Peter Bollinger

Peter Bollinger is an Australian-born American illustrator renowned in the field of commercial art, including for video game box art. Working both traditionally and digitally, Peter only painted traditional video game box art for a short period (1995–1996) before CGI took off and Peter started doing most of his work on the computer. 

Peter's production of digital box art appears to have been almost concurrent with his traditional game work, having done Cyber Speedway digitally in 1995 for the Sega Saturn, working in "Alias Animator" (a precursor to what is now Maya and Studio Tools). Peter recalls being “the guy” back then, where at maybe the second E3 expo (1996) he remembers having done a significant portion of the visuals there. In fact, the Alias software as well as the hardware—a Silicon Graphics (SGI) workstation—needed to produce then-‘High End’ CGI were so expensive at the time that likely few illustrators with experience doing box art even had the right setup to make the jump as the digital boom began. Peter did work across platforms and publishers and, having been at the vanguard of digital art, recounts it as a crazy time (“kind of bananas”) with jobs coming in nearly twice a week.

*A comment found online noted that Alias Systems' PowerAnimator software alone would have cost more than $30,000, apparently about the same price as a new Corvette [in the early 90s] and that the SGI workstation had an even higher price tag. The same PowerAnimator software was used to produce the T-1000 character in Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991), which won the 1992 Academy Award for Best Visual Effects; the visual effects had a reported cost of $460,000 per minute.

Peter likely did substantially more digital work than is documented in his box art catalog below. The list was put together based on images he included in his personal promotional pages at the time or archives online of his work. In addition to box art, Peter did other, related gaming digital work, such as for game title logos. One early example, though unused, was title art for Rise 2: The Resurrection (1996). Online portfolios further show an early logo for Spyro 2: The Season of Flame for the Game Boy Advance (2002) as well as the logo for the U.S. release of Pac-Man World Rally (2006).

Peter Bollinger has been represented since 1995 by Shannon Associates, the long-running rep for Earthworm Jim artist Michael Koelsch. The release dates of box art catalog indicate that all of his video game work would have come through, or at least after establishing, this representation. 

OVGA has included below Peter Bollinger’s known box art catalog:

1. Crash ‘n Burn (Crystal Dynamics, Inc. | 3DO, PlayStation, Saturn | 1995) though Crash n' Burn was included as pack-in with the console in 1993, the long box retail release with Peter's art does not appear to have released until 1995 (the back of the manual advertises Gex)
2. Gex (Crystal Dynamics, Inc. | 3DO, PlayStation, Saturn | 1995)
3. Cyber Speedway (Sega | Saturn | 1995) digital
4. Baku Baku Animal (Game Gear-US | SMS-Brazil, Saturn-US, Windows-US | 1996)
5. Killing Time (The 3DO Company | Windows | 1996)
6. Iron Man / X-O Manowar in Heavy Metal (Acclaim | DOS, Game Boy, Game Gear, PlayStation, Saturn, 1996) digital
7. Panzer Dragoon II: Zwei (Sega | Saturn | 1996) digital
8. Wipeout (Sega | Saturn | 1996) digital
9. Top Gear Rally (Midway | N64 | 1997) digital
10. Earthworm Jim 3D a.k.a. Earthworm Jim 3 (Interplay | N64-EUR, Windows | 1999) digital
11. Mickey’s Speedway USA (Nintendo | N64 | 2000) digital
12. The Operative: No One Lives Forever (Fox Interactive | Macintosh, Windows | 2000) digital