An untainted look at the cover of Shadows over Riva
While cleaning up my hard drive just now, %%% % % % I stumbled across a neat image that I thought I’d share with you. Here, for the first time, I assume, is a look at the original artwork for Shadows over Riva without any logo and without any cropping. This is the artwork that as it was delivered to us by Ugurcan Yüce, the artist who created the artwork not only for our Realms of Arkania computer role-playing games, but also for virtually all of the “Das Schwarze Auge” pen&paper games the “Reams of Arkania” games were based on.
Ugurcan is not only an incredibly talented artists but also a very nice guy and I remember visiting him in his home numerous times, watching and admiring him at work while his wife would serve me traditional Turkish treats. At Attic Entertainment Software, we commissioned the covers for many of our games from him, not only the “Realms of Arkania” games, but also covers for titles such as “Fears” and “Der Druidenzirkel.”
Most strikingly, every time Ugurcan did a cover for us, he was nice enough to actually allow us to keep the original paintings for good. This is something very few artists will ever do—or only at a significant cost—and shows you just what kind of a guy he is.
Anyway, I thought I’d share this little gem with you real quick because I know there are many die hard Realms of Arkania fans out there. Enjoy!
Impressingly awesome! 🙂 For me his paintings were always some kind of iconic for DSA.
Guido, will you have a look at the 3D remake of Schicksalsklinge which will be released next month?
Yes, I’m following the “Blade of Destiny” remake with quite some interest, of course. It feels kind of weird, though in a good way, to see other people take your creation and remake it from the ground up.
For a couple of years this picture was part of my children’s room till about 10 years ago when I moved out.
While I love the “setting” of the scene, similar to the HeroQuest cover for example: The heroes fighting the evil, all illustrated in combat poses. There were two things which I never really liked about the picture:
1. The combat poses themself don’t seem to make too much sense. How does the Dwarf get up there, the guy in the top left seems to be more focused on the camera than doing something effective, and the guy and the girl in the front seem to focus on showing the leg. Two seconds later and the woman would trip and fall.
2. The thing which bothered me even more was the disconnection with the game. As the cover picture shows something which implicates some huge monster which basically does not exist in this form in the game. When you fight the queen in the game, you are shrunk, you don’t have your equipment anymore but instead have to gather new armor made out of chitin from slayed bugs. That part didn’t feel very good in the game and of course half naked heroes in bug-rags on the cover would not look that awesome either. Still…
I associate this pictures immediatley with the memories of DSA and “the good old times” 🙂
I like them very much because they are very imaginative and full of atmosphere.
Still have the poster at my parent’s house in my old room that my father now uses as his office. He didn’t mind since the pen & paper round i ran at those times in the same room was one of the few occupations he was ok with. In contrast to video gaming all day long 😀 Althuogh this specific poster is video game related ^^
Oh, you’re right. I had completely forgotten hat we actually sold the cover as a poster when the game was released. Pretty heavy duty paper, too, as I recall. 🙂
Oh man! Would love to see this in a bit higher res if it’s possible so I could use it as a desktop wallpaper 🙂
Oh I remember that time well… was a great expierence for me… those were the best days of my life… 🙂 Working for a company as Attic was a really great experience… wonderful…