I figured this would be worth bringing up. The Elder Council group on Facebook has a number of galleries for each game in the series, though the images mostly consist of cover scans and official screenshots. However, I did find something very interesting in the Arena section. A massive, stunningly rendered illustration of the Halls of the Colossus which was probably digitized and touched up to make the ingame background seen in the game. It was pretty common back then (especially with adventure games) for people to paint the backgrounds and other closeups, and it certainly produced much nicer results than traditional pixel art could. I've downloaded the high resolution image and dumped it here for anybody who's interested.

http://imgur.com/O4u7j.jpg

Very interesting! I didn't know any snippets of Arena's artwork survived. Does anybody know what medium (i.e. oil painting) this is, by the way?

This is cool indeed - actually, ome of the things I lvoed more in A than in any other game was this sort of feature, showing a picture with a nice short story to get you in the mood.

Btw, the Halls of Collossus were one of my favourite all-time game experiences. I remember we had NO internet maps or stuff back then, so my bro and I ventured through and we found that very special area, where there is an answer to a puzzle. I rememeber us getting scared by the environment and the 'name' we found, indicating some sort of possible use in the future. Later on we discovered how wise it was to explore dungeons thoroughly and felt thrilled by this discovery.

thx a bunch!

wow thanks for the mention. I wonder if they have any more?

Ooh, cool! Seeing real paint in game art feels almost archaic now days.

How did you get the big image, btw? All I can see is the resized facebook one.

There's a "download high resolution image" link on the right, beneath the image.

Thanks. Thats what I get for having FB set to a language I can barely understand

Dwemeris?

Italian :whistling:

Pretty nifty. I wonder how they got that image into the game way back then.

They digitized it, one pixel at a time.

Bethesda always has amazing concept art. But this was really nice to see.

It is now my desktop wallpaper....i love it.

They digitized it, one pixel at a time.

HOLY