Postby bullis1 » Wed Jul 30, 2008 7:18 pm
I wasn't familiar with Dragonflight back then. I assume that book was published before Lethal Xcess?
Anyway, It's just a video game cover and whether it's a slight ripoff or not it's leagues ahead of most other western game covers from the era. Even as a kid I was usually disgusted by the shoddy or unintentionally hilarious "artwork" on game packaging. I will admit that home computers often had better package art than consoles did however.
Anyway, assuming the Dragonflight image is the earlier one, it's quite obvious that Celal had seen that image before when painting the Lethal Xcess cover. The Dragon's head and hind legs are nearly identical. Otherwise the painting is totally different. I'm going to say that this is more a case of "sampling" than plagiarism.
Also, in my opinion neither cover is creative anyway. "Warrior riding dragon in space/on other planet" is the most cliched book/game/record cover concept I can think of.
Member of the Atari Legend team