Steve Huston (b. 1959)

Steve Huston is an American fine artist and former illustrator known for his extensive career teaching art and coaching at Disney, Warner Brother, Dreamworks, and most other major entertainment studios. Though Steve is now more associated with his teaching than with his illustration career, after graduating from the ArtCenter of College of Design in 1982, Steve spent nearly a decade doing commercial work, where he counted video game companies Intellivision and Data East among his clients, along with big names such as Caesar's Palace, MGM, Paramount Pictures, and Universal Studios.

While at ArtCenter, Steve overlapped with famed video game illustrator Lee MacLeod, who was two years ahead of him in the class of 1980. Though Steve would only illustrate a small handful of video game box arts—four for Intellivision between 1986 and 1988 and two for Data East brand-name Draconian in 1989—he made regular appearances as a model for Lee’s video game box art, including in two of Lee’s earliest box arts, Death Bringer and The Kristal.

In Bitmap Books’ Art of the Box, Lee recounts Steve’s frequent presence in his work:

“[Steve] was a bodybuilder and a wrestler. And he is in almost every other illustration. He’s quite the painter himself and has created a huge career, but he was always willing—not always happy but always willing—to pose in various costumes and other things. And what was very fortunate was that he was a member of the Society for Creative Anachronism, and so he had armor and words and chainmail and all this great stuff. So he was really my go-to guy when a lot of these [video game] jobs came in.”

OVGA has included below Steve Huston’s full known box art catalog:

1. Super Pro Football (INTV Corp | Intellivision | 1986)
2. Body Slam! Super Pro Wrestling (INTV Corp | Intellivision | 1988)
3. Mountain Madness: Super Pro Skiing (INTV Corp | Intellivision | 1988)
4. Super Pro Decathlon (INTV Corp | Intellivision | 1988)
5. Chamber of the Sci-Mutant Priestess (Data East | Amiga-US, Atari ST-US, DOS-US | 1989)
6. Drakkhen (Data East | Amiga-US, Atari ST-US, DOS-US | 1989)