Legendary artist Roger Dean, renowned for his fantasy artwork and progressive rock album covers, has shared fascinating details about creating one of video gaming's most recognizable logos - the distinctive owl emblem of Psygnosis. The Liverpool-based gaming company, which published classics like Lemmings, Shadow of the Beast, WipEout, and Barbarian, became synonymous with Dean's striking visual identity that has achieved legendary status in gaming history.
In a recent interview with spillhistorie.no, Dean revealed that Psygnosis co-founder Jonathan Ellis gave him remarkable creative freedom when designing both the company's logo and even its name. Ellis had reached out to Dean after seeing his work from the 1970s and 1980s, during a period when Dean's artistic influence was at its peak. "We sold enormous amounts of posters and books back then," Dean explained. "During the seventies, my posters, books, calendars, etc., sold about 65 million copies, and by the mid-eighties, we'd passed a hundred million sales. So it was out there, you know. Much more than today."
The iconic owl design was entirely Dean's conception, and he also played a crucial role in shaping the company's final name, which drew partial inspiration from the cancelled Imagine Software 'megagame' called Psyclapse. "That was my job. They gave me an idea about the kind of name that they wanted, so even the name was partly mine," Dean revealed. "Both the name and the owl - they were very clear about what they wanted, but they didn't know visually or even how to put the words together. So the word came to me in the end, and the visuals."
Dean's creative process for Psygnosis game covers mirrored his approach to creating Yes album artwork, requiring him to complete projects before experiencing the actual product. "Very often I had to finish the covers long before the games were done, and the content of the games was as much influenced by the cover as the cover was by the content," he explained. "In fact, I would say that the cover was influenced by them describing what they wanted to do for the game, and then me visualizing it. And then they would reproduce that to some degree themselves in the games."
The artist described how game developers would pitch their projects in "much more extravagant terms than what the reality was." They would claim to be making an interactive movie, which would excite Dean, but upon seeing the final product, he would discover "these little matchstick figures." Despite this disconnect between vision and technical limitations, Dean found the work engaging and described the process as "fun" and "like going in another direction, I enjoyed that a lot. Especially the designs I did for The Shadow of the Beast, they were very different from any album covers I'd made."
One particularly interesting example of Dean's artwork directly influencing game development occurred with Barbarian. Dean had included a dragon on the game's box art, and the developers became so inspired that they incorporated his dragon design into the actual game. "The developers got very excited and asked me what I thought of their dragon. And I said, what dragon? Because I'd put a dragon on the box, and they said they'd put my dragon in the game," Dean recounted. When they told him the dragon appeared at the end of the first level, Dean admitted he hadn't even started playing the game yet.
While Dean's influence never extended to actual game design mechanics, his visual contributions became integral to the gaming experience and company identity. His artistic legacy in gaming extends beyond Psygnosis, as he also created the famous logo for Tetris. The collaboration between Dean and Psygnosis represents a unique period in gaming history when artistic vision and game development intersected in remarkable ways, creating visual identities that continue to resonate with gaming enthusiasts decades later.
