Lots of cool chatter about the bold, risky and nearly perfect choices for the Ultima 7 and 8 box art today. So let me add some background on another very interesting Origin box art decision, Wing Commander IV!
For the WCIV marketing campaign, Chris Roberts wanted to focus on a broader audiences. Gamers would play the new Wing Commander… so the spend focused on selling the interactive movie experience to a wider audience. This meant stuff like radio and TV spots, trailers in movie theaters and advertising in non-traditional places like in-flight magazines.
Game advertising was in transition in 1995 anyway but you can see the Wing Commander IV stuff is VERY distinct from previous titles.
So for the box, Chris wanted something similarly distinct. What they came up with was this, a quasi in-universe design with only the mysterious enemy logo (teased throughout the print campaign)… all in totally distinctive colors. Basically, as far from Star Wars as possible.
This was by the brilliant Trey Hermann who was fresh off earning a genuine advertising industry award for the stunning Bioforge box art:
There was a LOT of pushback though and in the end the game shipped with a slipcover around the logo design that kept the unusual style but added a more traditional piece of painted art:
The painting was by Austin artist Sam Yeates, who also did the talking heads for Super Wing Commander!
EA Europe refused to even entertain the crazy colors and instead did their own much more totally traditional take:
… but a matter of months later the situation was totally reversed: Origin declined Europe’s surreal Privateer 2 campaign in favor of a traditional one. Could be the timeless tradition of interdepartmental sniping or a case of different lessons learned from the same event!
By the way! The addition of the slipcover resulted in a little typo you probably never noticed. You can tell if you have a first printing of WC4 if it warms you of a “BIOLOGIGAL HAZARD”!
I will end by encouraging you to follow @UltimaDragons for more of that Ultima box art content mentioned at the start! The Ultima Dragons have been at this even longer than I have.
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