Continuing on from yesterday, here’s more work by the recently-deceased Mark McGinty.
First up, what might be his most iconic video game piece, the cover to Street Fighter II on the Super Nintendo Entertainment System. Allegedly, McGinty painted this using Polaroid photographs of the Japanese version for reference. Crazy!
I always enjoyed the cover art to Street Fighter II Turbo on SNES. I think this was the first time I ever noticed Sagat depicted as someone that’s super muscular, rather than his nerdy-looking lanky sprite design in SFII.
Next up is the box art for Super Street Fighter II, featuring the silhouettes of the New Challengers. While this art was used for both the SNES and Genesis versions, the SNES’s horizontal box orientation meant it got cropped to just the logo. The Genesis release got the shadows of Dee Jay, Cammy, T. Hawk, and Fei Long.
Here’s a fun piece of Blanka art that Capcom used a couple different times:
And finally, a gallery of all 12 characters from the original Street Fighter II. These are scans from GamePro magazine’s Street Fighter II Strategy Guide, and unfortunately have the characters’ names over their legs (and Dhalsim’s extended leg completely cut off). But it’s still cool to have these available at all:
These pieces also got used on the SNES version of the Capcom Fighter Power Stick box:
There’s various other art by McGinty for the SFII characters, but I haven’t been able to find it all. Below is a poster that came from Nintendo Power, featuring the Super SFII New challengers, Dee Jay, T. Hawk, Cammy, and Fei Long, but like the above gallery they all overlap each other and aren’t “clean” versions.
Here’s some clean scans using some of the above images, as well as alternate versions of Cammy, Dhalsim and Blanka.
It’s been fun going back and revisiting this art that was all over my gaming experience as a teenager the last few days. It’s such a shame that I had no idea Mick McGinty did all of it himself until news of his passing made me do a little bit of research into him. Honestly, I didn’t even know who he was when I posted about his Street Fighter II: Special Champion Edition box art on Friday.
In addition to his video game work, McGinty did a bunch of other commercial work including movie posters and album covers, as well as still life and landscapes. You can learn more about him on his personal website, www.mickmcgintyfineart.com — A lot of those desert landscapes are super cool.
Look up who did art you like, and tell them that you appreciate their work. It will mean so much to them.