They may be known as Studio Liverpool today, but there once was a time British developers and publishers Psygnosis were responsible for the greatest video game covers of all time.


No, you're not imagining things, we've republished this wonderful look at Psygnosis' box art to help celebrate Kotaku's PC Gaming Week.

From the mid-80s to the mid-90s, the team responsible for developing and/or publishing games like Lemmings, Shadow of the Beast and Barbarian (and who would later go on to create the Wipeout series on the PlayStation) broke from the infantile and/or boring styles preferred by other companies and went for a look that was part Heavy Metal, part Moebius and all brilliant.


Things began to get a little more tame as the 90s dragged on, with their fantastical art going out of style and Psygnosis moving away from home computer development and towards consoles, but for just under a decade, they were kings of the art of...box art. In honour of that, then, we present this gallery of their finest work.

In case you're wondering - and really, you should be - who's responsible for many of these, you can primarily thank two men: British artist Roger Dean, who not only designed the company's famous "owl" logo, but provided the art for the covers of games like Brataccus, Barbarian and Shadow of the Beast, and Melvyn Grant, whose works include the covers for Baal and Anarchy.

This image was lost some time after publication.

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