We spoke with the man behind the Psygnosis logo – and so much more!
English artist Roger Dean is a living legend, and his work in the video game industry represent just a small chapter in his extraordinary career. Dean was born in 1944 in Kent, but spent much of his childhood in Greece and Hong Kong. His father was an engineer in the British Army, so the family had to move wherever his work took him. In particular, the years he lived in Hong Kong would later become an important source of inspiration for him.
After returning to England, he studied art, architecture, and furniture design, and it was actually in the latter field that he had his first breakthrough. He designed what he called the Sea Urchin Chair, a predecessor to the famous bean bag chair.
But it was as a visual artist that he truly made his mark. In 1968, he created his first album cover, for the British rock band The Gun, and later became heavily involved with the prog rock bands Yes and Asia. His cover for Asia’s debut album was voted the second-best album cover of all time by readers of Rolling Stone Magazine in 1982, and it was also Dean who designed the very first logo for Richard Branson’s newly established Virgin Records.
It was in the 1980s that Roger Dean first became involved in the video game industry, where he was not only responsible for a number of iconic game covers, but also some of gaming’s most recognizable logos.
When we reached out to Dean to ask if he would like to do an interview with us, we honestly didn’t expect him to respond. And if he did, we assumed it would be just a small handful of questions answered by e-mail. But not only was he interested in talking with us, we ended up having a long and pleasant video call, during which he happily showed us his work and chatted about a variety of topics.
Note that our main focus was on Dean’s work with games, so if you’d like to read more about everything else he’s done, you could, for example, check out this profile interview at We Love Vinyl. You should also visit his website.
In this article, we present an edited version of that conversation, supplemented with a bit of extra information about the topics we discuss.
The Black Onyx and Psygnosis
We start in the mid eighties, which is when Dean first gets involved in the games industry. His first cover artwork was created for The Black Onyx, a game you’ve probably never heard of unless you’re very interested in the history of gaming. Because even though the producer and designer of that game was an American – Henk Rogers, who we’ll talk more about later – the game was only released in Japan. While it isn’t a famous game, it is an early example of a role-playing game developed in Japan, and it would help influence how Japanese developers approached the genre.
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