Lost Levels :: View topic - Hideaki Kodama (Konami illustrator) Lost Levels - A website about unreleased video games.
A Japanese seller going by the username jfkh1192 on Yahoo Auctions has been selling paintings by a certain illustrator named Hideaki Kodama (小玉英章). You might not recognize the name (he doesn't seem to have an entry on the Japanese Wikipedia), but you will definitely recognize his work if you were ever into Konami games.
He also did some advertising art to promote the PC Engine consoles released in 1989 and 1990.
He has an official website, but it hasn't been updated since 2002 unfortunately. It seems most of his portfolio consists of car-related illustrations. I'm hoping more of his gaming-related work will surface in the future (if there is any).
Very cool! Especially since a lot of such promotional artwork ends up getting cropped, and then further obscured with additional overlaid graphics.
That is cool. I like the PC-Engine stuff since I've seen those in ads with text obscuring parts of the images.
Now, who did some of the FDS art, like Almana no Kiseki? That would be great to see larger prints of.
Here's another one that almost slipped by me from the same seller. It's from Racin' Force, a 1994 game released exclusively for the arcades.
I wouldn't be surprised if Kodama-san did a fair share of Konami's old promotional art besides the ones already posted here. The unused Arc Hound cover art I posted here a few years ago in a prior thread seems similar to his style. I'm willing to bet he was responsible for the original Metal Gear cover (since Kodama did a few traceover works for his Area 88 covers for a certain edition of the manga), but I can't say conclusively.
This Kodama artwork isn't directly gaming-related, but I thought it looked very similar to the Rad Racer vehicle select screen. Not sure how common the whole "vehicle drawn in profile shot on a black background" theme was back then, so it's probably coincidence.
Here's the vehicle select screen for reference's sakes.
There's that possibility, but he sells paintings from another artist too, namely Susumu Kanamoto (金本 進). I never seen him auctioning artworks from anyone else though.
Anyway, the seller is auctioning more game-related Kodama art.
Rushing Heroes - The U.S. flyer has the artwork mirrored. The game was never released in Japan.
This particular piece is branded "RI", but I can't recognize it from any particular game. It might not even be Konami-related at all.
I wonder if this person also did the goonies 2 art. I would make a bid on that if it ever came up.
The boxart for Goonies II, Metal Gear, Armana no Kiseki and Maze of Galious all have a very similar style, as does the flyer art for Devil World, Combat School, and Jackal, but I'm still not certain if Kodama was responsible for any of them.
By the way, here's one of the covers that Kodama drew for the Scholar Manga Bunko Series edition of Area 88.
It's based on on the poster for the the 1985 movie D.A.R.Y.L.
And here's Mickey Simon from the cover of another volume doing his best Maverick impression.
The unused Arc Hound cover art I posted here a few years ago in a prior thread seems similar to his style.
And here's the artwork for Over Drive. Apparently the game never got distributed in Japan either, so we only got a U.S. flyer with your usual Chicago-based models posing for photos.
Looks like Kodama has done at least one artwork for a non-Konami game, Super Aleste.
Curiously this artwork was used for a Japanese advertisement, but the actual boxart for the SFC version is different. It was used for Space Megaforce, the SNES version, but for some reason they covered half of the female character's face up.
Two more Kodama flyers are being auctioned, but I can't identify the source for either of them.
This looks like it would've been used as promo art for Quarth, but I don't think any version of the game featured this artwork. Block Hole, the export arcade version of the game, had some graphical changes, but it didn't involve some Dragon Quest-looking prince fighting against some Shazzan-lookalike while dodging transparent blocks and huge spheres in an aircraft.
As far as I know, Konami never made any World War II-themed shoot-'em-up back in the day (Time Pilot has a WWII-themed stage, but that's it), so this must've been for some other company. However, it doesn't like anything that was used in Capcom's 1942 series, or the Strikers series for that matter.
Thanks! I suspected the first artwork was for some kind of Arkanoid-esque game, but I didn't know Toaplan had made such a game. I mostly know them for their STGs and the Snow Bros. series.
Never would've guessed the second one either. I'm not too familiar with the X68000 library outside its arcade ports. I really need to get around exploring its library more in-depth one of these days. EDIT: Looks like it's a port of Wings of Fury.
The boxart for 和光のファミコントレード/Wako no Famicom Trade (released for the Famicom's Network System add-on) looks very similar to some of Kodama's other works. Was this particular piece auctioned? I don't remember seeing it listed.
Compare that with the artwork featured on the following tumblr page.
I wonder if these artwork made for some Wako ad campaign or something similar (Wako is a huge retail chain in Japan).
By the way, it turns out that the flyer art for Hard Puncher was Kodama's work too. It's on his official page.
You can find some of the past auctions here.
The picture featured on the Tumblr post you linked has been auctionned recently, but I have no idea about Wako no Famicom Trade.
I knew I've seen that painting auctioned on Yahoo Japan, but it didn't show up on their internal search engine. They tend to delist sold auctions after some time has passed. In fact, Google is how I found most of the artwork on the opening post.
The Hard Puncher/Final Round image was apparently reprinted in the 1990 book JCA Annual Vol.9, which is part of a series of artbooks published by the Japan Creators' Association/ 株式会社 日本クリエイターズ協会 . For some reason it's attributed to Ryu Hirose.
This Kodama painting is also attributed to Ryu Hirose. I'm guessing the name is either, a misprint or an alias that Kodama used.
Doing some research on this JCA organization led to yet another relic of a website. Apparently they were affiliated with some other group called ICO (International Creators' Organization). Otherwise, there's very little online information about either organization.
Looks like the seller is made an effort to identify Kodama's work this time.