While playing Gone Home, you probably found at least one of the faux SNES carts in Sam’s room. What we haven’t yet revealed is that they feature guest art from awesome game artists, who kindly lent us their talents to create these unique cart labels.
The most easily found one is Adventurous The Cat Returns, a presumably bitchin’ sequel to the well-loved Adventurous The Cat we all probably know and love from childhood. Adventurous is all grown up now, and has acquired sunglasses and a motorcycle.
This beauty was perpetrated by Lee Petty, art director at Double Fine, creators of Psychonauts, Costume Quest, and Brütal Legend, and the upcoming Broken Age. (Here’s Lee Petty’s blog, and his twitter). The task we gave him was to make an overly “cool” Bubsy-esque cat character, and he… he did it. (Here is a link Lee sent us, of a higher res version of the label!)
Lee Petty also helped us out with some drawing and handwriting by his little daughter, who drew the picture of Sam and Daniel, for example.
(Company foolishness: one of Steve’s cats is called Adventurous.)
The next game cart is called Journey of Crystal. It’s supposed to be a JRPG of some stripe (Secret-of-Mana-ish, probably), featuring, of course, magical crystals and rad-colored hair.
This one went to Jen Zee, Art Director at Supergiant, who made Bastion and are making the hyper-sweet-looking Transistor. (Here’s her tumblr, and twitter.) We really just gave her the concept, and she ran with it.
(Side note: we had a whole list of fake games chambered for these carts, and Journey of Crystal was I believe the sequel to (possibly just brought to the US later than) Secret of Time Crystal, which was of course the premier game in the series.)
Last we have Super Spitfire, which is a Star-Foxesque space combat sort of thing. The directive was to show a space pilot of unknown gender, their radio handler, and a space station under siege.
This was pulled off wonderfully by Rachel Morris, a damn fine illustrator who’s done a lot of work for the NYU game center (her website, and twitter). This was the first label that we got into the game, and it charmed the hell out of everyone who saw it.
(This also may bear a publisher’s logo that… may be a little familiar?)
So, that’s a few excellent pieces of art from industry luminaries who by all rights should be too busy to do things like this for us. But they did! And they are the best! Thanks again to all of them for their contributions to Gone Home!
The Fullbright Company 