Roger Dean – His legendary artwork in gaming history (Psygnosis)

Summary

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. The logo Dean created for Yes in 1971 has its own Wikipedia-page. Photo: Leticia Chamorro, CC BY 2.0. 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 ...