"My covers kind of fired up that imagination."

First released in 1977, the Atari 2600 — or Atari VCS, as it was originally known — wasn’t the first home video game console. But it did help usher in a novel concept: having games stored on cartridges that you could swap in and out of the machine. These games were sold individually in stores, and the boxes lining retail shelves had to do a lot of the heavy lifting in terms of promotion. One of the earliest games to hit the Atari 2600 was Combat, which was not only part of the first wave of launch titles, but came packaged with the console for several years. It was also the first cover painted by Cliff Spohn, an artist who helped define the look of Atari box art early on. “I kind of approached them like a paperback book cover or a poster for some sporting event,” says Spohn.

His goal was to show players what screenshots couldn’t. “The little icons on the screen were so abstract,” he says, “so the kids that were playing it would be picturing submarines and battleships and airplanes and all of that kind of stuff. So my covers kind of fired up that imagination.” Spohn’s art dominated the early covers, but as Atari grew, so did its roster of artists. Soon he was joined by a crew with a diverse range of backgrounds. Adventure artist Jaekel, for instance, had experience in textbook illustration, while Rick Guidice had worked on space-colony concept art for NASA in the 1970s. Even George Opperman, the late graphic artist who created the enduring Atari logo, chipped in a few covers.

For some impressionable youths, the art even helped shape their lives. Lapetino, for one, credits those early covers with getting him into the field of graphic design. “I didn’t know there was such thing as design or illustration,” he says. “But I liked it, and it really appealed to me, and I think this idea of image making really got me thinking about art, and eventually design, as a career.” The quality of the art and the imagination it required is perhaps even more impressive considering few of the artists actually played the games their work was based on. “I never played the games, I was totally clueless about that,” says Jaekel. Likewise, fellow artist John Enright had never played a video game at all prior to taking on the assignment, and says that “to this day I have never played a single Atari game.”

Instead, the artists would get a basic outline from an art director at Atari on what the game was about and what concepts the cover needed to get across. Some artists, like Steve Hendricks, would actually interview the programmers and designers working on the games to get a better feel for what they were about. But Atari also gave them a good amount of freedom to do what they wanted, which could be one of the reasons the company ended up with such a fantastic collection of box art for its console. “It was really nice to work with them because they were pretty open about what it was that I could do,” says Jaekel. “As I recall, I don’t know that they really gave me much direction. They just would tell me what the game was about, sort of loosely, and it was up to me to come up with a concept.”

Today, covers for big games largely follow a familiar template, and trailers and screenshots can do the job that was once in box art’s domain. There’s now a formula that appears to work with consumers, something that didn’t exist when Atari was starting out. “They really spent a lot of money, and they spent a lot of time, working hard to create individual identities to help sell these games,” says Lapetino, “so that each game had a different feel based on totally custom artwork.”