Silversword ending / Freaky Dancing cover

Blog posted by Ste Pickford on Thu, 18 Jun 2009
Subject: Wizards & Warriors 3

This nearly blew my mind yesterday!

I was scouting around for something to stick up on the blog for today, and rooting around in my old Silversword backup dir (otherwise known as Wizards and Warriors 3, an NES game we made around 1989 / 1990 - see yesterday's blog entry for more), when I came across a file called 'end'. That's the picture at the top, showing the evil wizard of the game, looking menacing over a tall castle. I don't actually remember drawing this, but presumably it's a screen that forms part of the end sequence of the game.

What struck me was how familiar the pose looked. Hang on - that's a Freaky Dancing cover! A quick root round another directory of old comic stuff and I found this scan of the cover to Freaky Dancing #9. Freaky Dancing was the nightclubbing fanzine I co-created around the same time as I was working on Silversword. So the top image represents my day job around that time, and the bottom image is what I was getting up to in the evenings.

What's weird was that I never realised I'd drawn pretty much the same image twice. Only seeing them both on the same screen 19 years later was it clear how similar they were. I think I drew the top one first, but can't remember.

That particular Freaky Dancing cover is probably the best drawing I ever did for the fanzine, and one of the few things I've ever drawn that I'm still really proud of. That's A Guy Called Gerald tucked away in the bottom right hand corner, and the side of a head, with the closed eyes, just below the sticking-up hand on the right is Nicola, who later became one of the contestants in the first series of Big Brother. I remember she always closed her eyes like that on the dancefloor, and sing along, when they played You Used To Hold Me by Ralph Rosario.

The creases are because it's a scan of an actual surviving copy of the fanzine, not the original art, and by that time the Zippo Games office photocopier (that I cheekily used to print all the copies of the fanzine, every other Friday night) was absolutely knackered (because of all the fanzines I was printing), and used to jam up and crease practically every other sheet of paper.

Tags: pixel art, boss, freaky dancing, cover, castle, king

Follow up post: Silversword concept art - King

View the softography page for Wizards & Warriors 3 »

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Interesting stuff... A good reminder that everything in the world was, is, and will be influenced by something else.

Comment by Lonersquare, added Mon, 11 Mar 2019 21:38:59 GMT