{"id":597,"date":"2009-10-16T11:10:52","date_gmt":"2009-10-16T16:10:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.vintagecomputing.com\/?p=597"},"modified":"2009-10-16T11:53:24","modified_gmt":"2009-10-16T16:53:24","slug":"the-worlds-weirdest-video-game-art","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.vintagecomputing.com\/index.php\/archives\/597\/the-worlds-weirdest-video-game-art","title":{"rendered":"The Weirdest Video Game Box Art of All Time"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"World's<\/a><\/p>\n

And you thought eatin’ shrooms to grow bigger was strange. How about this: flying green crabs dropping red clay bricks on a grinning, toothy duck wearing a cape and glasses with a double-barrel shotgun coming out of his mouth.<\/p>\n

At least it’s set in a pond, so the backdrop isn’t too fanciful.<\/p>\n

The game is Deadly Duck<\/em> for the Atari 2600, a 1982 shooter title published by 20th Century Fox. I’ve played it, and it’s not too bad. It’s a vertical shooter, similar to Space Invaders<\/em> and Demon Attack<\/em>.<\/p>\n

\"Deadly<\/a>You play as a duck striving to gun down flying crabs that drop bricks on you — actually, around you. When the bricks land, they temporarily impede your movement to the left or right, then disappear in a few seconds.<\/p>\n

This is one of the many vintage video game box illustrations that rendered the typically absurd and abstract situations of extremely low resolution games in a very realistic and literal manner. Super Breakout<\/em><\/a> for the 2600 is one of my favorites (it also inspired a 2006 Halloween costume suggestion<\/a>).<\/p>\n

You can find many more examples of this curious art form on the web<\/a>, including many parody boxes, so watch out for fakes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

And you thought eatin’ shrooms to grow bigger was strange. How about this: flying green crabs dropping red clay bricks on a grinning, toothy duck wearing a cape and glasses with a double-barrel shotgun coming out of his mouth. At least it’s set in a pond, so the backdrop isn’t too fanciful. The game is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25,13,24,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-597","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-art","category-video-game-info-and-history","category-humor","category-retrogaming"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vintagecomputing.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/597","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vintagecomputing.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vintagecomputing.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vintagecomputing.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vintagecomputing.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=597"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.vintagecomputing.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/597\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vintagecomputing.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=597"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vintagecomputing.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=597"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vintagecomputing.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=597"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}