#ariolasoft

WARNING: LONG POST AHEAD

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you, my first game art project in some years... Scarabaeus (aka Invaders of the Lost Tomb in the Americas). "Scarawhat?" you might be asking, and you wouldn't necessarily be wrong to do so. Even among classic computer gaming afficionados, this is not a particularly well-known title. But it should be, for Scarabaeus (developed by Andromeda Software and published by AriolaSoft in 1985) was an amazing achievement for its time. Blending creative use of sprites, custom character sets and bitmap graphics, it allowed players to walk and rotate their way around 3D mazes, chase remarkably spooky ghost-like apparitions, and solve tricky puzzles with numerous hieroglyphics, medicines and poisons. It did this across three increasingly large floors of a pyramid, and it did it all within the paltry memory limitations of the Commodore 64.

I have accomplished many gaming feats in my life, but beating Scarabaeus is not one of them. I never stood a chance of beating this game. Our copy was pirated, and without a manual it was impossible to know how the game functioned or what you were supposed to do. I would frequently take poison by accident or zoom to the bottom floor and softlock the game by using up all the puzzle moves on the Pharoah's crypt without having gathered the clues. But I was enthralled by the graphics, music and experience nonetheless. I spent hours haphazardly doing between okay and horrible, never understanding why, and loving it all the same.

As we moved into the internet times and I start doing work on video game art, I longed to create a print for my beloved Scarabaeus. It was, along with other notables like Contra and Wasteland, a white whale, even moreso than the others because it did not have their renown. To this day, 40 years later, virtually no high resolution scans of the game exist online. Those few that do are of the audiocassette version, which was printed in small size and questionable quality. Pixelated low-resolution photographs have been uploaded to fan sites of other renditions of the game. Occasionally, an excellent condition copy of disk versions of the game appears on eBay (usually at a price of $400+) but these listings do not feature scans, nor are the sellers particularly inclined to provide them.

It seemed that Scarabaeus, like SimCity or the NES version of M.U.L.E., was destined to never have properly appreciated and replicated art. But then, one day recently, during a conversation on the C64 subreddit someone pointed me to an eBay listing of an artist catalogue from the mid-80s that had a small picture of the full sized artwork on a single page. I didn't want to pay $140 with shipping, so I used that information to find reference to the art being used in an issue of Heavy Metal; this revealed that like some other games of the time (such as Ballistix), the art for Scarabaeus wasn't made for the game but repurposed from another source, in this case a 1981 illustrated edition of H. Rider Haggard's 1887 novel She.

The full piece of art, seen here as taken from the eBay listing of the art catalogue, is painted in watercolor by the late Michael Embden, who illustrated a number of fantasy novels in the 80s before shifting to personal landscape painting in the 90s. Also noticeable is how much of the picture has been cropped for the game; this is not merely due to the landscape orientation of the image but due to the story of Scarabaeus involving a lone explorer (and his dog) going through tombs, while She involved a group of individuals (seen on the stairs here) going to tombs. Including the entirety of the picture would have been incongruous with the game (not that it was unheard of in those times).

Anyway, digging around with the knowledge of She led me to find someone who, miraculously, had a 3"x5" photograph of the original art used for printing purposes. They were willing to share the image with me on conditions of non-commercial usage and limited exposure to the internet for usage of the same. (Thus, the images above are the largest sizes I am sharing -- they are superior to anything hosted on webpages currently, but inadequate for commercial production.) I had to do some touching up to remove blemishes and color-correct -- this was material photographed four decades ago and forgotten in some back room, after all -- but it was a crucial piece.

From there it was a matter of replicating the rest of the game's box art, which came in two varieties. The left image above, more sedate and appropriate to the trepidation of exploring, was used for cassette tape and flat-paper disk packaging. It features a teal-grey game logo with blue shadowing, teal-grey and blue striped box around the main art with its own grey shadow, a background of white cubes on light grey (common for AriolaSoft games) and the Ariolasoft logo. The right image, used in plastic clamshell packaging for disks, is set up more like one would expect of an action game with an 80s feel: pink logo with pink shadowing, black background sharply contrasting against the yellow art border and the AriolaSoft logo topped by a rainbow bar.

All aspects of the images were created manually except for the game art itself. The game's font is Sinaloa, which I found with the help of Reddit (none of half a dozen font identification systems online could get the answer right); the font for AriolaSoft is Compacta MT Cyrillic, or at least's close enough for government work. All colors for the logos, borders and backgrounds are approximations based on limited pictures available online. Note that the two images contain different colorations of the main art; this is because, whether by design or virtue of different production standards, the cassette/flat disk packaging bore blue-tinted art while the clamshell packaging had a yellow/green tint to it.

‘Basil the Great Mouse Detective’

[C64 / CPC] [GERMANY] [MAGAZINE] [1988]

Power Play, January 1988 (#01)