I was busy doing some site maintenance and posting docs yesterday, when I ran across the manual for a little shoot-em-up game called Lethal Xcess (Wings of Death II) from the Amiga/Atari ST era. I had never played nor heard of the game before, yet something struck me as oddly familiar about the cover, shown here:
Image: /e107_images/newspost_images/thumb_LethalXcess.jpg
As I stared at it, I reached for what memory that image could have possibly been triggering. Then it finally struck me. Does the image look familiar to anyone else?
Click "Read the rest" to see what I realizedIt was an old book cover from Dragonflight, by Anne McCaffrey. As far as I can tell, Celal Kandemiroglu (the artist for the Lethal Xcess cover) pretty blatantly ripped off Michael Whelan's work on the Dragonflight cover: Image: /e107_images/newspost_images/thumb_LethalXcess.jpg Image: /e107_images/newspost_images/thumb_Dragonflight.jpg I always wonder how much of this kind of thing happens in the world of art. There was the modeling of the original Metal Gear cover after Reese from Terminator. There were all the Neverwinter Nights avatars that were modeled after pictures of celebrities. I guess it's hard to tell what really comes from someone's imagination and what is just copying something else. I also wonder if this guy would've gotten sued if anybody realized this. I did some quick searching but couldn't find anyone else pointing out the similarity between these two pieces of art. I feel like I should win some kind of prize for solving this mystery. | 
Main Menu
05 Jan 
