Over the past few weeks, several people have pinged me to point out the alarming similarities between Amazon.com's promo art for their new "retro gaming" store and the six-year-old Retronauts logo. Hackles are raised! Suspicions are expressed! Has 1UP been pilfered? Judge for yourself:
The answer, of course, is, "No, you're being silly. But Atari might want to consider a lawsuit." Yes, both logos feature an astronaut and an oddly colored pixel rainbow, but that's simply because we both went to the same well to draw our water. Namely, the well of the
Super Breakout box art for Atari 2600.
I specifically asked Retronauts logo designer Karen Chu to borrow imagery from Atari boxes, and she totally did. Amazon clearly had the same idea in mind... they just weren't as imaginative about it. We borrowed;
they pilfered. Tsk, tsk. Their "astronaut" is the space jockey (no, not
that space jockey) in the lower left of the Super Breakout box, and the rainbow was lifted directly from the artwork before being flipped upside-down. You can even see the tip of the large astronaut's helmet still in the colored bars, inverted (because there's no gravity in space!). Someday, we will teach Amazon's designers the magic of Photoshop's clone tool.
So please, put down your pitchforks, gentle souls. We're all just stealing from the masters.
http://www.1up.com/do/blogEntry?bId=9098882
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