Although not many people get to see them these days, the Atari 2600 games had some great package artwork that captured the vivid nature of what the games had to offer. Now, Tim Lapetino wants to celebrate it with a new book called The Art of Atari: From Pixels To Paintbrush.
The goal of the book is to celebrate the 136 different artworks used for such Atari 2600 games as Defender, Warlords and Baseball, among other titles. Atari spent a lot of money attempting to make the artwork stand out from other game designs at the time, a move that paid off for several years.
Lapetino is working closely with various artists from the era, including Steve Hendricks and Cliff Spohn, to gather the art for the book. He currently runs a graphic design agency, but is still fond of the Atari era. “I remember being five or six, when we first would get Atari games at home, I wanted to save all the boxes,” he said. “My dad through that was ridiculous. Why would you save the box that it came in You just want to play the game. But I just loved the look of them.
“When you lined them up on the shelf, they were all these different colors. I didn’t have a word for it, but they had this uniform typography. They all had a similar look. And then the illustrations were just these really amazing worlds.”
Lapetino hopes to release the book by the end of the year.
Source: Polygon
