We've seen some truly iconic logos in the history of video gaming. Sega's timeless typography is instantly recognisable, and I still miss the classic Konami 'bacon strips' logo.
However, perhaps my favourite logo of all time is that of Psygnosis, the Liverpool-based company which published the likes of Barbarian, The Killing Game Show, Blood Money, Lemmings, Shadow of the Beast, Microcosm and WipEout.
The company's distinctive owl logo has become the stuff of video gaming legend and was designed by Roger Dean, perhaps most famous for his amazing fantasy artwork and memorable prog-rock album covers.
Dean has been speaking to spillhistorie.no about working with Psygnosis, and reveals that he had a pretty free rein when it came to producing both the logo and the company name. He met Psygnosis co-founder Jonathan Ellis around the same time he met Henk Rogers to work on the packaging for Black Onyx, and explains that Ellis got in touch after seeing Dean's work from the '70s and '80s.
"We sold enormous amounts of posters and books back then," he says. "During the seventies, my posters, books, calendars, etc., sold about 65 million copies, and by the mid-eighties, we’d passed a hundred million sales. So it was out there, you know. Much more than today."
Dean reveals that the legendary owl design was all his idea, and he also helped shape the company's final name, which was partly inspired by the cancelled Imagine Software 'megagame', Psyclapse:
"That was my job. They gave me an idea about the kind of name that they wanted, so even the name was partly mine. Both the name and the owl… they were very clear about what they wanted, but they didn’t know visually or even how to put the words together. So the word came to me in the end, and the visuals."
The artist also discusses his working process when it came to creating the famous covers for titles such as Barbarian and Shadow of the Beast. He reveals that it was very similar to making covers for Yes albums in that he was expected to have completed the project before he could actually see (or hear) what the product actually was:
"Very often I had to finish the covers long before the games were done, and the content of the games was as much influenced by the cover as the cover was by the content. In fact, I would say that the cover was influenced by them describing what they wanted to do for the game, and then me visualizing it. And then they would reproduce that to some degree themselves in the games.
They described the game, usually in much more extravagant terms than what the reality was. They would say they were making an interective movie, and I’d say 'wow!'. And when I saw it, there would be these little matchstick figures…"
Dean describes the process of working on Psygnosis covers as "fun", and "like going in another direction, I enjoyed that a lot. Especially the designs I did for The Shadow of the Beast, they were very different from any album covers I’d made."
He says his input never went as far as contributing to actual game design, but one of his covers did influence the design of an enemy in Barbarian:
"The developers got very excited and asked me what I thought of their dragon. And I said, «what dragon?» Because I’d put a dragon on the box, and they said they’d put my dragon in the game. And I said, 'oh, you have to show me.' And they said, 'it’s at the end of the first level, you haven’t gotten beyond the first level?' And I said 'noo… I haven’t even started the first level!'"
Dean also famously created the logo for Tetris, in case you were wondering.