Hellfire Warrior (1980): How Epyx brought the Hell on Earth.

This is the first in a long series of posts dedicated to the Epyx earliest artwork and manuals.  I always found very fascinating the artistic choices made for all their Automated Simulations Series published from the 1979. 

The duo tone colour spectrum was very common for most of all the Epyx artworks and even now they still look very archaic and evocative. Considering that almost all CPRGs from the late seventies and early eighties were monochromatic, bidimensional and quite basic, the artwork side and all the literature around were fundamental to create a credible suggestion.

We all literally started to play from the cover and Hellfire is a very "bright" example of what Epyx was capable to hallucinate. 

Hellfire Warrior, Cover Manual, 1980

Source: Museum of Computer Games History

Temple of Terror, Advertising (1987)

Even if most of the Fighting Fantasy videogames produced were adventures and not CRPGs, I always liked all the related visuals and all the artists involved in the FF project. The advertising below is referred to Temple of Terror which was released for C64 (tape/disk), Spectrum 48k (tape) and Amstrad (tape/disk) in the 1987. The game itself was based on fourteenth Fighting Fantasy Book with the same name written by Ian Livingstone and it's nothing more than a text adventure.

From a visual point of view, the style of the illustration is pretty old school fantasy from the eighties/nineties, where a quite rich use of the colour was mixed wisely with the classic Western/European Medieval iconographical style. The artist name is Christos Achilleos who designed many of the FF artworks and related publications as well. 

Advert in a 1987 not confirmed Magazine showing the U.S. Gold/Adventure Soft (UK) release.

Source: http://fightingfantasy.wikia.com/wiki/Temple_of_Terror_(computer_game)