Super Metroid Art?

[Ice Trooper]

Hi! I found this site a long time ago and was greatly pleased by the art selection. It's usually hard to find official Metroid artwork! As someone who loves video game art, I was excited. But one thing I noticed bothered me...The Metroid Database's logo was on almost all of the pictures. Now, I know people have reasons for doing these things, but it still bothers me. It just detracts from the picture.

One section in particular was the Super Metroid art. I was surprised to see official artwork for most of the enemies in the game (I always love seeing art of generic enemies, they are often unappreciated) but disappointed to find a logo plastered on them.

I was just wondering if there was an important reason for this, because personally I'd love to see the art in it's pure unaltered form (except, you know, scanned onto the computer and uploaded to the internet and stuff...)

I'm sorry if this isn't in the right section.

[mental]

I'd have to agree. It's not like the MDb is responsible for creating the art, and as time goes on that stuff will start to have increasing historical value -- which is damaged by damaging the pictures with logos.

[Ice Trooper]

Oh, but there is one thing that I thought was cool though. There are some pictures in the Super Metroid gallery that are marked as *new* and they don't have any logos on them! It's a start, I guess. (it's really nothing personal, I just hate all logos and watermarks that get in the way of a picture)

[CapCom]

Watermark was something that was in vogue at the turn of the century as a way of preventing image distribution to prevent shameless image stealing. (IGN is still a big culprit despite the fact that they get paid for their reporting, but you'll remember that Nintendo took MDb images for their Prime and Fusion strategy guides, which is pretty sad because it tells me Nintendo probably doesn't keep an image library. On the other hand, I couldn't care less about some minor fansite in France or Brazil!) Watermarking is still used by big news sites like IGN and Gamespot - oddly enough, they add the watermarks on images that you can get from the official homepages of the game companies. Archives, on the other hand, NEVER use it, unless of course that's the only image available (in which case they'd replace it with a new one later).

I'm no longer convinced it's something that needs to be done, and the historical value is the main part of it. I always hated adding them because they tended to ruin the images. We've had some discussions on it, but new art we're adding doesn't have watermarks - or at least not visual ones (we're experimenting with metadata as an alternative). And we WILL have a lot more new art where these came from (currently waiting for an image shipment from VGMStudios). I will probably eventually go back and redo the watermarked images, but it is a lot of work to pull out the originals that I did, and there are dozens more that were originally done by TJ that will likely have to be scanned again.

And well, if the images show up elsewhere, everybody should know anyway that the MDb was the original source of all these images to begin with!

[Ice Trooper]

Thanks for the reply! That was very informative. I'm glad I finally decided to ask about it...(I wanted to when I first found this site's gallery a few years ago)

But, was the art in the Metroid Prime/Fusion guide really taken from this site? I mean, that's kind of odd. But, kind of cool in a way...sort of.

Anyway, I'm looking forward to more pictures. I always love seeing official artwork for older games.

[Infinity's End]

which is pretty sad because it tells me Nintendo probably doesn't keep an image library.

It's not that they don't keep an image library. It's that they didn't give the appropriate resources to the friggin' publisher when they requested them OR the publisher was too f'n lazy to track down the real artwork for themselves so they just brought up the MDb in 2 seconds and saved out the images (much more likely the case). Hey it's Metroid, no one gives a fuck about that anyway, right?

Watermarks are necessary because everyone steals from the MDb. No other fan site on the web has the resources to track down their own images when it comes to the old games so they just steal it from us. Even IGN does. There's a French site that took all our old game art and photoshopped out the MDb watermark. It's totally obvious they did, but they still did it!

[CapCom]

It's not that they don't keep an image library. It's that they didn't give the appropriate resources to the friggin' publisher when they requested them OR the publisher was too f'n lazy to track down the real artwork for themselves

Judging by what Capcom USA did with the Okami Wii box art, I'd say it was a similar situation. This was the official Nintendo strategy guide too, not the Prima guide. The simple fact of the matter is game developers don't tend to have all their materials readily available, and in many cases they don't even keep records. I heard some pretty bad stories about development materials getting trashed. When they remade Final Fantasy III for the DS for instance, they had hardly any of the original resources to work from. This is a serious problem, and lazy magazine and cover design is only the tip of the iceberg.

Also, independent fan pages and especially IGN are things we keep considering. It's definitely something we have to consider, and reactions from site visitors regarding this are important to us.

[mental]

Watermarks are necessary because everyone steals from the MDb. No other fan site on the web has the resources to track down their own images when it comes to the old games so they just steal it from us.

See, I really don't get the stealing part, except for the obvious case of hotlinking/bandwidth theft. It isn't like the MDb created the originals.

Especially considering that the physical originals are getting older, eventually the MDb copies may eventually be the only ones in existence. From a historical perspective, it really seems a shame to deliberately damage them just to assert some sort of fake ownership.

[Ice Trooper]

Don't know if I should bump this old topic or make a new one...Since this is already here, I figured I'd bump it.

I've noticed new art since I last posted here (particularly the ones from VGM Studios and the German Guide) and they are pretty awesome by the way.

But...I was still wondering if there will ever be non-watermarked versions of the watermarked pictures?

(sorry if I shouldn't be bumping a 20 month old topic and if the subject is no longer relevant...)

[Smoking Spoon]

Well.. this is a touchy subject . Since we are in the era of programming and internet , would it be impossible to have ( I don't know anything in programming ) a some sort of encryption for their respective owner ( One for Author and one for publishing website ) so the image could be intact ( no watermark etc) . I mean, there must be another way than having something written on the picture .


But yeah I know, the watermark is also a kind of publicity.

[VGMStudios]

I can officially say that I will finally have time to start scanning next week. I need to study this week for a competition but after that Ill start scanning stuff.
and I would want them watermarked cause I would want them accessible to the Mdb and no where else.

VGM out...

[Infinity's End]

Especially considering that the physical originals are getting older, eventually the MDb copies may eventually be the only ones in existence. From a historical perspective, it really seems a shame to deliberately damage them just to assert some sort of fake ownership.

and I would want them watermarked cause I would want them accessible to the Mdb and no where else.

^ It's this. It's not that we're trying to imply ownership over anything. Wikitroid is another culprit of a site that steals 80-90% of all the images we have worked damn hard on to put on this site. With not a hint of credit. Scanning shit is a pain in the ass and when you do many many images at once it can take several hours. We pride ourselives for having full galleries of all 3 Primes. The Classic games artwork... and even more. It's one of the things that we want people to come to exclusively the MDb for. Metadata might be a solution for getting rid of watermarks, but there is always going to be specific, exclusive things that we just don't want other sites to have. Is it selfish? Maybe, but I also think that's our preogative.

There's also another book out there on game design where they stole a MDb image and PS'd out the watermark.

[Violet]

The fact that people Photoshop this kind of thing out anyway if they want to just makes me figure you might as well not bother. I don't know, I much prefer things being made available for the fans untouched, and that's how things should be. Why do you need credit? You know its your stuff, most people in the community know its from here originally. If you built up a huge archive of images its not like they would all need watermarks. People would visit just to see the archive of high res images.

I know it takes effort, and its nice to get credit, but this is coming from someone who also spends time scanning things and stuff like that... what we're doing is archiving things for fans and future proofing things digitally before they're lost forever. Its important to make these things as high quality and as untouched as possible, for the sake of the fans and for the sake of future fans.

You don't NEED the credit. In the future, when this site eventually (god forbid) closes its doors, people will just look at those images and wonder what the hell MDB stands for and why they're lumped on all these otherwise awesome and hard to find pictures.

So yeah, that's just my opinion on this. People should be archiving this stuff for the fans, not for their own credit. YES it takes a lot of work sometimes and that sucks, but what do you expect, a cookie? I certainly don't. You should feel proud to share all this awesomeness and create the archive yourself.

And yeah, its not like you guys actually did the art in the first place anyway. Some poor designer at Nintendo who nobody knows did all the hard work, you guys just slapped a watermark on someone else's work. Not judging, just saying.

[mental]

I'm kind of with Violet on this one.

[Infinity's End]

Considering almost all of the new artwork that has been placed on the MDb as of late has been watermark-free, I don't think anyone has any room to talk.

If you want to start high-quality scanning all the old shit and submitting it to us as new watermarkless images, go for it.
We'll be happy to have it and add it once we get time to do so.