A few weeks ago, I was in the Philippines and stumbled upon this gem when I was looking through my cousin's old PS1 games.
It's a Japanese or Chinese bootleg of Red Alert for the PS1.
Lets take a moment to analyze this wonderful cover art.
So... we know that whoever made it took enough time to overlap the logo over the image of some random pilot. I'll give them credit for that considering this was done in like 1998 maybe even 2000.
Photoshop wasn't exactly easy to come by. If you look a bit closer at the "E R " on top of the pilot, you can actually see that some of the letter's outlining was cut off. So someone made a copy of those letters and pasted them on top of the cutout of the pilot without making sure that none of the letters outlining was clean cut.
This is all a clear sign that this was not only not done in an editing software but, PIECED TOGETHER BY HAND using old-school graphic designing techniques (like with a lined cutting board)! One other reason I know this was all hand-made is because you can see a crease-line where the guy accidentally bent the leg of the "R" but, didn't bother to replace it.
The entire scene is littered with fighter jets. I kind of doubt the dude that made this even played the game because not only are none of these aircraft in the game,
Behind the centerpiece is a scene of an aircraft carrier with what appear to be F-15E Strike Eagles from the 80s (because they're as generic of fighter jets as you can get for the 90s) taking off from it.
As many of us know from playing the game, aircraft carriers and US jets don't appear ANYWHERE in the game. The only time they ever appear (as of the late 1990s) was in the FMVs and renders from Tiberian Dawn.
Also, of all the flags featured on the cover, only three of them actually participate in the game: Germany, England, and Greece (USA if you count their Allied affiliation and General Carville in the expansion). What's interesting it that it also includes Turkey and Spain which weren't playable countries until the expansions.
No clue as to how Australia, Japan, South Korea, Israel, and Egypt got involved but, they're apparently in the game according to this cover art.
With that in mind, check out that sweet scene of jets flying over the Great Pyramids of Giza.
WHERE THE HELL WAS THAT IN THE GAME?!
I get they wanted to spice up the cover art by adding cool action shots but, that wasn't even in the game! What makes it even funnier is the fact that the Pyramids wouldn't appear in Red Alert until Yuri's Revenge. So this random bootlegger unintentionally predicted Yuri's Revenge maybe 3 or 4 years before it came out.
Yeah, sure, the pyramids could technically count as a scene from the original Command & Conquer but, lets not give these bootleggers THAT much credit.
And for a last bit of icing on the bootleg cake, how about that castle?!
You might say to yourself, "Hmm...I do not recall there being any medieval castles in Red Alert."
That's because THERE AREN'T!
But, could you imagine how stoked you have been if your first exposure to Command & Conquer was this fake box art?
I mean, I would have been on the edge of my seat waiting for that final mission where I storm Stalin's secret castle lair! Screw the nukes! Stalin had a freakin' castle!
I wonder what the fake story about the game would have been about...
Russia isn't referenced once anywhere so, lets assume Japan or Egypt decided they wanted to take over the world using fighter jets. But the UN (in bootleg Red Alert 1940s) said, "Nah", and deployed aircraft carriers to storm the castle of the evil Egyptian/Japanese mastermind, Fukuroshi Tutankhamitsu. You also play as an ace US pilot named, John Westwood (the pilot on the cover), and command forces to build bases while you fly above the battlefield in your jet. Israel joined in too cause they wanted to get back at Egypt for making them help build the pyramids or something. I dunno.
The back isn't anything special since it's just a photocopy of the actual back cover.
Don't mind the staggering $249.00, the exchange of the Filipino Peso to USD is about $4.98 USD.
Sadly, the actual disc for the game is long gone but, I can imagine it probably had an even crazier design (if it wasn't just "Red Alert" written in sharpie on a blank disc).
I know most of the stuff on this forum is supposed to relate to OpenRA but, I couldn't let this thing stay forgotten by time.
Somewhere in the Philippines a guy is having a drink not knowing that people are currently paying in depth attention to his work of 2 decades ago.
