AZPIRI: THE MAN WHO SOLD DREAMS
IN A CASSETTE BOX

Once upon a time there was a Commodore 64 game cassette. On the box, an illustration that took your breath away: a warrior from another world, an explosion of colour, a scene that promised adventure, action and quite probably eternal glory. You put the cassette in, waited through the endless minutes of loading with that background melody you already knew by heart, and then... the game appeared. And the game was what it was.

Let the record show: this is not a complaint. It is a tribute. Because the man behind that impossible cover was Alfonso Azpiri, and what he did with a brush was, simply put, art. Real art — the kind that needs no excuse or context to exist. That the game could never live up to what he had drawn was not his fault. If anything, it was the highest compliment one could pay him.

Alfonso Azpiri Mejía was born in Madrid in 1947, into a family of musicians. He could have ended up playing piano at some conservatory. Luckily for all of us, he decided his thing was drawing. His first comic strips appeared in the magazine Trinca in the early 1970s, and he never stopped. He created cult characters like Lorna —his favourite creation, a science fiction series not exactly suited for the school bag— and Mot, aimed at a younger audience.

But what matters to us, what brought us here, happened in the 80s. Someone at a company called Dinamic had the brilliant idea of calling him. It was an 18-year-old kid named Pablo Ruiz. He said he wanted covers for some games. Azpiri said yes, come over and we'll talk. And that was how it all began.

Let's be honest: Azpiri's covers and the games they illustrated sometimes had a very... creative relationship. The cover showed you a heroine straight out of a blockbuster science fiction film. The game gave you a 16x16 pixel sprite moving across a flat-coloured screen. The gap was so wide it was almost comical.

But here is the key: it worked. Not only as a hook on the shop shelf —that too—, but as an object in itself. You looked at those covers while the game loaded. You kept them. You put them on the wall. They were more than advertising: they were art that came free with the cassette.

Alfonso Azpiri made close to 200 covers for the great Spanish software companies of the 80s: Dinamic, Topo Soft, Opera Soft. Titles like Viaje al Centro de la Tierra, Abu Simbel Profanation, Phantis, Camelot Warriors, Mad Mix Game, After the War... names that anyone who owned an 8-bit computer back then has permanently burned into their memory.

And when the Golden Age of Spanish software began to fade in the early 90s, Azpiri did not disappear. He kept drawing, kept attending conventions, kept signing books and giving away illustrations to his fans with an impressive generosity. In 2009 he published the book Spectrum, a collection of his 80s covers. Then came the three volumes of Tape Covers. And in 2012 he received the RetroMadrid lifetime achievement award — the very least they could do.

He even collaborated with modern studios —he made an alternative cover for Dark Souls II when Bandai Namco commissioned it— and worked with a small retro studio to illustrate La Corona Encantada, a game for ZX Spectrum and MSX presented at RetroMadrid 2009. The man never stopped.

He passed away on 18 August 2017, at the age of 70. He had been diagnosed with cancer. He had attended RetroMadrid that same year, signing, drawing, talking to the people who had admired him since childhood. To the very end, he was one of us.