J. Allen St. John was one of the great early fantasy illustrators in the early 20th century and teacher to the famous Frank Frazetta. For video game artists, his art seems to have been a bit out of scope due to its age, but there's at least the title screen of Dragon Buster II, that looks a lot like the image of an archer he did for the novel At the Earth's Core by Edgar Rice Burroughs. The creature might have even inspired the dragon's heads, although the cover definitely comes into its own.

Casaro's poster for Conan the Barbarian was already briefly mentioned on the previous page as an example of the "King of the Mountain" trope, here it gets its own imitators. One of the ladies on the Lady Sword cover actually seems to be Leia from Return of the Jedi (see next page).

Speaking of Zak McKracken, the Japanese version for FM Towns computers uses a different image - aside from the hero turning into a stock anime boy, his pose actually somewhat resembles the above poses, but the execution is very different. How do we know it is probably a rip-off, anyway? Well, one of he cover variants for the home computer game Joe Blade uses the same pose. Still no sight of their common ancestor, though.

The movie poster for Army of Darkness is another play on the King of the Mountain trope. Not only Duke Nukem's personality is inspired by Bruce Campbell's greatest movie role, he also likes to pose in the exact same way. Given the tone of the game, it seems a little odd that they didn't trace over the hot chick that clings to his leg, too.

This castle doesn't come from real life, though, but is ripped straight out of an illustration by Clyde Caldwell for the Ravenloft module in Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, Dracula included. Caldwell is a very prolific artist seen in countless Magic the Gathering and D&D publications, and also provided some of the covers for SSI's Goldbox series. This is the only cover in the classic NES trilogy where we haven't found a stand-in for Simon's pose... yet.

But that's not enough: The American cover for the next sequel in the series also seems to take hints from a Clyde Cadwell illustration. Compare the knight who deflects the dragon's fire with Trevor Belmont to the right. They look a bit different, but the stance is similar, and the set of stairs is replaced by one of the spinning cogwheels in the clock tower. The fact that it might have been the same artist who already traced from Caldwell for the Simon's Quest cover makes this more likely. Warriors fighting dragons in similar poses also appear on the flyer for Irem's arcade shoot-'em-up Youjyuden, and an ad for the NES version of Hydlide but that is also not close enough to really prove a connection.

One of Ocean's cover artists (Imagine was one of their labels) for their home computer games apparently was a huge fan of The Punisher, cause there's a strange tradition of taking poses from the covers of a mini series by Mike Zeck.

This might be the oldest reference material to ever appear in this list, and it's also one of the most frequently copied. One would think the simulation-heavy action RPG by British game programming pioneer Mike Singleton used it intentionally for a specific effect rather than as a mere drawing help, though. And it wasn't the only one:

The Creation of Adam in the Sixtinian Chapel of course is just as iconic as the Vitruvian Man, although many imitators just focus on the two hands reaching out to each other. In Ai Cho Aniki its appearance as a boss in a half asteroid of course is a parody more than anyone else. Sparkman even combines it with one of Hajime Sorayama's Gynoids, of which we'll see more later...

M.C. Escher's impossible constructs are another popular source of inspiration for game artists. It took until 2013's Antichamber to create an entire world upon similar ideas, but for cover and title screen artists the job has always been easier. The mix of board- and arcade game Archon was one of the biggest PC titles of its time, although copying Escher seems to have been always more acceptable than other artists due to their more or less abstract nature. The shape that's copied here is actually not the big one from the center, but the smaller one to the lower left.

Giving the skeleton hair and a helmet wasn't enough to disguise this cover...

Admittedly, these look quite a bit different than the original paintings, but the perspective and the structure of the pillars are just too similar to be coincidence.

Another famous painting, La Mort de Marat! If it goes on like this, we uncultivated gamers might even get some art history education out of this. (This time the painting had to be cropped, the original is once again behind a click.)

Turrican is totally heavy metal, so Manowar should totally let this one slip through (and they did, even if it was unknowingly).

Another metal album cover: AWA Software's Bedlam on the ZX Spectrum is a rather shameless rip from Iron Maiden's Killers.

Yet more metal...

From metal to prog rock. The most peculiar factor of this pair is the relative obscurity of the game: Dungeon was a very early computer RPG in Japan, long before Dragon Quest pushed the genre into the mainstream over there.

Well, actually this is about the European-developed home computer versions of Gun.Smoke, which started in their homeland of Spain as the clone Desperado. Only for the UK market Capcom picked the game up and released it officially with the Gun.Smoke title. The game's ending shot recreates one of the most iconic panels from Lucky Luke, which was even made immortal with a larger-than-life statue in the Belgian town Charleroi.

You know what this article didn't have so far? Western games copying Japanese paintings. So here's one, only on the European Mega Drive version of Populous 2: Two Tribes, but still.

More Japanese-to-Western influences - Sorayama's sexualized female cyborgs have titilated game illustrators like none other, more often than not for games with erotic content of some sorts. Sometimes it's hard to tell whether an example was copied directly from Sorayama's paintings, or more loosely inspired by the general concept of a sexy Gynoid. Others are much more obvious...

We've got surprisingly few manga and anime references so far, but the arcade fighter Asura Blade is here to help rectifying that. The skull displayed in the "vs" screen is almost the same as a drawing in Berserk. It was removed from the update/sequel Asura Buster.

This is a really weird love triangle. Blaze on the Streets of Rage cover was clearly traced from the film poster of Sister Street Fighter, while Axel's pose originates from Gymkata, of all the martial arts movies to chose from. But that's only the beginning of the mess: When the American version of Final Fight 2 came along, the cover showed many elements cobbled together from both the Streets of Rage 1 and 2 - or so it seems. While it reuses Blaze's pose for Maki, Carlos copies Sonny Chiba's punch - which is not represented on any of the SoR covers. Other elements, like the guy with the knife who falls on his back, and that weird green dude coming out of the sewer appear on two game covers, but not in the film poster. This can only mean that either the artist for all the game covers was one and the same person, lazily reusing his references, or there's a deeper conspiracy going on that we haven't even begun to grasp.

The cover for the Game Gear Shinobi in turn has a male version of the Sister Street Fighter heroine, including the thug whose face she's kicking in, but they're pretty tiny at the lower end of the picture.

The saucy shot that reveals the central element of the poster through the legs of a barely-clad woman got copied in a lot of covers and ads for all kinds of games - from upper left to lower right there's SSI's sci-fi sports sim Galactic Gladiators, SEGA's arcade shooter Thunder Blade (which we'll meet again on page 4), Al Lowe's saucy adventure Leisure Suit Larry, the racer Downforce, the fighting game Evil Zone, the tank shooter BattleTanx, the anime-licensed Japanese adventure The Space Adventure Cobra and Playaround's Atari 2600 porn game Bachelor Party.