Ste Pickford has updated the Pickford Brothers website with a piece of concept art from a game Zippo Games once made for Rareware, called Ironsword... ever heard of it? :-)

Here's what he wrote on the website:

I uploaded the finished graphics from the game a few weeks ago (see link below pic), and here's the original concept art.

This was a sketch of The Eagle King for the Ironsword game design doc we pitched to Rare. I think we already had the contract at this point, but we were keen to impress so did more concept art for this game than was typical around the time (1987).

Other than a single screen mockup (which I always hated doing - the concept art equivalent of the dreaded vertical slice), we tended to design graphics as and when we drew them for the game, rather than having anything like a pre-production phase, as is more typical now.

Designing characters and enemies in advance, on paper, was fairly unusual back then.

For more info about the Pickford Brothers games, please visit their website at: http://www.zee-3.com/pickfordbros/