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The Gallery of Hideous Box Art Vice: Project Doom
There was no shame in missing Vice: Project Doom back in 1991. The year was quite busy: Nintendo debuted the Super NES, Sega pushed the Genesis harder than ever before, and the NES put out visually impressive wonders like Battletoads. In this heated competition, a Nintendo Power cover was the best that a multi-genre NES game from American Sammy could really expect. And that was all Vice: Project Doom got.

Boy, I wish someone was around to hear my witty, relatively well-translated NES banter. Enter a dark and twisted world where mutant barbarians throw giant nuts at you.

Fortunately, Vice: Project Doom earned a following some fifteen years down the road, when just about anyone could fire it up and see just how it stands out from the usual NES hackery. A side-scroller with frequent echoes of Ninja Gaiden, Vice: Project Doom puts a hard-boiled special agent named Quinn Hart through jungle hunts, criminal underworlds, and an ugly alien conspiracy. Vice isn’t particularly original in concept, but it’s versatile in the details. Quinn’s arsenal includes a .44, and grenades, and a subtly effective laser whip. The gameplay divides itself similarly: action-platform stages compose most of Vice: Project Doom, but it occasionally breaks into first-person shooting or Spy Hunter-esque driving stages. And it wraps everything up with a story as gritty as NES games could allow.

Then there’s the cover. American Sammy had the right idea in capturing the game’s cinematic and manful tone. And then they airbrushed the hell out of that idea.

Don't worry your pretty head, babe. This thing shoots water and it was only $1.97 at Walgreens.

Quinn Hart, resolute generic action hero, becomes a beefy romance-novel cover model, with a ripped shirt and a vague Mel Gibson look about him. He’s evidently supposed to gaze at some out-of-frame threat, but it really looks like he’s wondering why his plastic handgun is half-melted. His Bond Girl companion has apparently noticed this as well, and her over-airbrushed stare is disconcertingly alien.

So the second Google Image result for 'Gun-Dec' is this shot of Christy except she's NAKED, which made me think I'd stumbled on the secret American CENSORSHIP of the game. Then I figured out that I'd just found some weirdo's gallery of NES-game women edited to remove their clothes. They brought in David Mamet to punch up the dialogue.

But just who is that glaring, reptile-eyed woman? In the game, Quinn gets help from two informants: his doomed girlfriend Christy and the apparently more wary Sophia. The cover artist combined them, so the woman has Sophia’s hairstyle and some revamp of Christy’s cocktail dress. Apparently Christy’s punk-rock mullet wasn’t marketable enough.

Here's the plan: we take this image, Photoshop in Estelle Getty, then sell it to some rube as art for an unreleased Stop or My Mom Will Shoot NES game.

The cover of Vice: Project Doom’s Japanese counterpart, called Gun-Dec, simplified things. Still cut from the Gibson-Stallone-Willis realm of movie stardom, Hart goes without a chimerical arm-candy woman and instead just points his Beretta out into space. There’s no electricity, no mist, and no gratuitous use of the airbrush. Gun-Dec wasn’t all that big in Japan, either, and that can’t be pure coincidence.

Next: Wings of Love

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