ICO - Cover Art

This is the European cover art for the surreal adventure videogame entitled ICO (Playstation2, 2001). This cover art was painted by the designer/director of the videogame himself - Fumito Ueda.

  

Fumito Ueda^

Giorgio De Chirico^

As demonstrated in the comparison above, this painting is a direct homage to Greek-Italian surrealist painter - Georgio de Chirico. Ueda uses the typical colour palette found in De Chirico's more famous paintings, consisting mostly of yellows and orange with contrasting blue sky, which is often too dark for the colour of the ground which suggests brighter sunlight than portrayed.

Along with the colours, Ueda has adopted many other De Chirico trademarks. The scene is set in an inhospitable desert at around sundown. The shadows are cast at irregular angles and provide heavy contrast with the colour of the ground. Due to the feel of the painting, the building in the background appears seemingly unoccupied. Archways are a common feature in almost all of De Chirico's landscapes involving architecture. The only architectual differences are the windmill and the ladder - neither of which were ever painted by De Chirico. Fumito Ueda painted the windmill structure as homage to an area within the game itself. I believe the ladder is included in this composition as ladders are a key element throughout the game, and suggest that the game's gameplay emphasis lies on exploration and puzzle solving - the latter enforced by the mysery of the painting itself.

ICO - Protagonists^

Figure in Di Chirico's painting^

Also, the two characters in Ueda's painting (The game's protagonists) bear direct resemblence to the girl in De Chirico's Mystery and Melancholy of a Street (1914). Not only are these two portayed as 90%  silouhette's, but their shadows and posture in motion are almost identical.

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Use as an unconventional cover:

 

American cover in comparison to European.

In comparison to the vast majority of videogame covers at the time, the European cover for ICO was unlike any other. Not only was it a departure from the digitised representations of in-game characters seen on 90% of videogame covers, but it used subliminal messages to give an insight into what the game entails. Strangely enough, it was this cover which made me pick the game up, buy it, play it, and love it.