Imagine you’re a video game producer in the late 1980s, a week before the deadline and you still haven’t got a cover for your game. Desperate and exhausted from weeks of crunch, you tell your underpaid contract illustrator to just rip off some Schwarzenegger action movie to get the job done. Turns out the artist took the order a bit too literally and delivered an all too obvious copy, but you need that cover right now so you run with it anyway.

In such or similar fashion, many vintage games have taken images from movies, album covers, paintings and even other games as sometimes more than just inspiration or homage. The subjects of this article aren’t simply similar designs or characters (or else we'd never quit counting the games influenced by Nausicaä, Hokuto no Ken, or Alien), but very specific images that might have been either literally traced, digitized or just used as a very obvious reference for promotional or in-game artwork.

Special thanks go to Tatsujin from the old Assemblergames.com forums for the original inspiration to look for and catalog these images, as well as to Kurt Kalata of Hardcore Gaming 101 for hosting the original incarnation of this gallery, first posted in 2012. This Retraced Edition is slowly being rebuilt, comparison-by-comparison, with many improvements, additional features, and new discoveries. For updates on the latest additions, follow me on Bluesky. (That’s also where you can tell me if you think I made a mistake, or found an even better match for a covered piece of artwork.)