Altered Beast

Michiaki Sato ( Michiaki Sato, 1960-) is a Japanese illustrator, mechanical designer, and manga artist. Born in Tokyo. The name may not sound familiar, and when you look up any biographies about him usually all you learn is that he's worked on a lot of anime. Almost 35 years ago though, he painted something for Sega that has gone on to become one of the most iconic game covers of all time. It's the only Mega Drive / Genesis cover he ever did as far as I know.

For some reason, Sega changed the coloration of the painting significantly when reproducing it for the Mega Drive box art. The hue seems to have been shifted so that what was once a lot of red tones now are much more yellow.

Altered Beast was my favorite arcade game from 1988 to 1990, due in part to how much the visuals appealed to me as a kid who loved monsters. Naturally when I saw that the Sega Genesis CAME with it I became obsessed with having to have one. Luckily, my parents were awesome enough to get me one for Christmas in 1990.

The only scans of the original painting I can ever find are low resolution, so I've spent more time then I could ever calculate using every trick in the book to try make a higher quality image that can be used for various purposes, and I've probably scrapped progress and restarted a dozen times as well. I've found various scans that each had different parts that were better than the other, and stitched bits and pieces of them together to try to get the best of all of them in one image, and then ran multiple filters to try to remove noise but then add sharpened shadows and highlights.

At this point I think the image now looks about as good as it can, and I hope that if Michiaki Sato were to ever see it he would be pleased with how much I tried to retain the original look while improving the visibility of it as much as possible.