The American arcade flyer for Donkey Kong, Junior, circa 1981. I was never really a fan of the game, but there's no denying that the artwork is terrific. A lot of the best videogame illustrations come from this period, when graphics were still too abstract and blocky to really stand on their own. You needed to provide your own imagination to fill the gap, and suspend disbelief.
Here, the Nintendo characters like Mario and Donkey Kong hadn't been canonized yet, so you still have that American, Popeye inflence, instead of the Yoichi Kotabe designs from Japan.
Oh, that reminds me. One of these days, someone is going to have to explain to me why Kotabe retired from animation and went to Nintendo, of all places. I don't have a clue how someone goes from Horus and Heidi to illustrations for Mario and Zelda. It's all so...weird.
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