
Artist Roger Dean's work has sold over 150 million copies worldwide and has graced everything from album covers to art galleries.
For gamers, however, he's most famous for his contributions to the covers of various games published by Psygnosis, including Shadow of the Beast (1989), Barbarian (1987) and Brataccas (1986). He also designed the iconic Psygnosis 'owl' logo – arguably one of the coolest video game logos of all time.
Dean is also responsible for the world-recognised Tetris logo, and his relationship with Tetris Company co-founder Henk Rogers goes back quite some time – he designed one of the covers used for Rogers' influential RPG The Black Onyx.
Dean – now in his late '70s – recently sat down with Rogers and Tetris creator Alexey Pajitnov to discuss the recent Hollywood movie based on the rights battle for the game, as well as a wide range of other topics.
This entire freeform discussion is well worth a watch, but Rogers speaks a little about the Apple TV movie's liberal use of 'poetic licence':
There's a car chase and all kinds of stuff that never happened. It's 75 percent Hollywood I would say... we went through the script a bunch of times... we couldn't fix the Hollywood stuff, but you know how it is when you take a picture of something that's beautiful and then you look at the picture and you look at the real thing, the real thing is always more beautiful than the picture.
Comments 3
correction: the psygnosis logo is in fact "arguably" THE coolest game logo of all time! no need for the second qualifier.
roger dean is a legend, having done the cover for the Yes albums "close to the edge" and "Fragile," and Uriah Heep's excellent "Demons and Wizards."
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That logo is iconic.
I enjoyed the Tetris movie but yeah, it was clearly embellished for entertainment purposes. Still a decent introduction to the whole saga, I think.
@-wc- The Yes album covers really are something else. Their beauty is one of the reasons I lament the shift to digital music; it's not the same when you can't listen to an album while gazing at the cover art! I have a massive soft spot for Relayer because the cover is so good.
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