the other day i was talking to @garudina about bad shareware box art and i brought up Nitemare 3D, whose box, appropriately, haunts me. at first it just seems tacky, but you slowly start to realize how awkward and out of place the "enemies" look, and then you see the fucking gun AND THEN YOU SEE THE HANDS
for like 10+ years i have been thinking about this box art. why do the hands jut out like that. why are the knuckles out there. how are the fingers at such violently different heights. why is the thumb where it is. it's like they're somehow holding a thing that has a single grip but using the hand position that they'd use for holding two grips.
i've put a few dozen hours into learning to draw, but I ain't great, and i understand that hands are hard. still, i just don't know how one would arrive at these decisions, even if one was completely unskilled. they are astonishing choices, and looking at this picture scorches my neurons.
while expressing all of this, it suddenly clicked. i got it, and i didn't understand how i'd missed it all along. the enemies are obviously drawn way too well to have been from the same artist, so they're clearly clip art. and so are the hands.
someone was saddled with making box art, and they had zero ability to do that, so they got out their clip art CD and went through it for two hours, trying desperately to find something that looks like a hand holding a gun. this is the closest they got. and then they needed the gun, so... they drew that part. couldn't be avoided. the result is perhaps the worst act of perspective foreshortening in history - but not surprising if you consider that this may have been the only thing this person had ever drawn in their life.
