Blood Money Boxart

[ransom1122]

It seems the boxart was originally made for a book named Protector by Larry Niven in '79.



Is the illustrator Peter Andrew Jones and was the same art used for The game.

Anyone want to more light on this topic?

[lilalurl]

I think the Mobygames entry sums it well, so I'll just copy paste:

The artwork used on the front of the box and on the intro screen is called "Protector" and was made by the well-known British illustrator Peter Andrew Jones. Like a lot of his art, the piece has appeared on sci-fi book covers: it was first used for a 1979 British paperback release of Larry Niven's Protector and depicts Phssthpok the Pak, a main character from the book. It also appeared on a Dutch edition of Niven's Ringworld Throne and is featured in Jones' art book Solar Wind.

https://www.mobygames.com/game/c64/blood-money/trivia


http://www.peterandrewjones.net/pain...ion/swa150.htm

The wikipedia entry also has bits about it and especially redirects towards a site that might interest you:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_Money_(video_game)
http://www.peterandrewjones.net/pain...ion/swa150.htm

[Predseda]

Author is Peter Andrew Jones. You can check almost 400 cover box author here:

http://www.lemonamiga.com/games/boxart_list.php

[ransom1122]

Cool, is Phssthpok the Pak the name of the main character if so was the name transferred into the game?

[Predseda]

Of course not, most of the cover arts were unrelated to actual games in Psygnosis range.

[ransom1122]

Well there you go, I never knew this, I always thought the art was made for the game.

[Cherno]

I have a Sci-Fi art book titled "Solar Wind" featuring art by Peter Jones. It lists the "Protector" cover art as being made, or published, in 1978 for a series called "Futura". Interestingly, the character "Phssthopk" mentioned in the back cover of the Protector novel is also the name of a Peter Jones painting which has the same character art as Protector but a different background (less sandy terrain and a more UFO-like spaceship).

[Predseda]

Originally Posted by Cherno

I have a Sci-Fi art book titled "Solar Wind" featuring art by Peter Jones. It lists the "Protector" cover art as being made, or published, in 1978 for a series called "Futura". Interestingly, the character "Phssthopk" mentioned in the back cover of the Protector novel is also the name of a Peter Jones painting which has the same character art as Protector but a different background (less sandy terrain and a more UFO-like spaceship).

There are two versions of this painting, both are present on Jones' website linked by lilarulr above.

Look: http://www.peterandrewjones.net/pain...ion/swa150.htm

[ransom1122]

The one on top looks updated

[BarryB]

I also read that book, I mentioned it here too :

Originally Posted by BarryB

No game downloads

I know the Blood Money cover also features on a book I read by Larry Niven called Protector:

[Foebane]

Does Peter Jones not know how planetary atmospheres work? The planets in this picture, especially the big orange one, should be BEHIND the green atmospheric haze here, because as it is, they look like they're floating in mid-air like giant balloons.

[Cherno]

Originally Posted by Foebane

Does Peter Jones not know how planetary atmospheres work? The planets in this picture, especially the big orange one, should be BEHIND the green atmospheric haze here, because as it is, they look like they're floating in mid-air like giant balloons.

True as that may be, reality is not always as exciting. For sci-fi paintings in particular, it was probably more important t0 the artist (and publisher) that the image looked striking than realistic

[BarryB]

Not everything in Sci-Fi novels has to conform to known laws of physics, it's Sci-Fi, anything can happen

[Revenile]

The fun of Sci-Fi is when the world presented is able to believably bend the laws of physics, so that what they're talking about is impossible know, but explained in such a way that the reader/viewer/player is like "huh... that makes sense somehow." Yay for technobabble.

[Tigerskunk]

I always thought that the cover was the best thing about blood money... Then the intro.
Couldn't stand playing the game for more than 5 minutes.

[Gordon]

The box art of Agony was also taken from somewhere else

[ransom1122]

Yeah I seen that, and read about the agony cover. Maybe we can detect how many amiga boxcovers were ripped from other sources now?

[Dunny]

It's funny because although the cover was obviously sci-fantasy, Niven is very much in the hard sci-fi realm.

Phssthpok is not the alien on the cover - that's Jack Brennan. Phssthpok is descended from a branch of humanity from many millions of years ago. This species lives close to the galactic core, and has three phases of development; Baby, Breeder and Protector.

At a certain age, the breeders get restless. They desire a certain plant root which when eaten causes the Protector stage of their development to commence. They lose all their teeth, and the gums form a hard beak. Their skin becomes wrinkled, leathery and incredibly tough. Their joints swell to increase the moment arm to the muscles - which increases their strength exponentially. They lose all their hair as their head expands to encompass a more complex, larger brain; they're phenomenally intelligent to the point where they have no free will - they automatically see the right choice every time.

But they have a problem. They are linked to their children (babies and breeders) by smell. They have one single goal - to protect them, and they will fight to the death any other protectors they encounter that don't smell right. Because they're also super-intelligent, a group a long time ago struck out amongst the stars to get away from the constant war on their home planet. They found a small, young yellow sun with a suitable planet with no intelligent life.

There were some enormous and pretty vicious creatures living on the planet though - so they sorted those out by dropping an asteroid on them.

When they got down some time later and released their breeders in the equatorial zone, they found a problem - the root that causes the Protector stage wouldn't grow. No more protectors but the breeders would continue to proliferate. They would be warlike, but not intelligent enough to be really aggressive. At a certain age, they would start to enter some of the changes of the protector stage, but without the root they would eventually die of old age.

And one of those older Protectors has just come looking to see what happened to the colony. He's entered our Solar System and encountered a Belter called Jack Brennan.

The book is the story of what happened next.


I can highly recommend it, along with all the other books in Niven's "Known Space" series.

[DanScott]

Always a bit of an in-joke at Core back in the day...

[Predseda]

This is brilliant