Mana Tree artwork from SoM

[invisibleham]

Hi Gang,

I was curious about the artwork for Secret of Mana, specifically, the Mana Tree artwork used on the box:



I was curious if anyone knows any more about this piece, who the artist is, if it still exists, anything about it.

Cheers

[Kassidy]

The artist is Hiroo Isono, born 1945 and a free-lance illustrator as of 1970.
I suspect that the piece was specially made for Square at the time, and it's not listed on his page. If I find out more I'll post here about it.

[invisibleham]

Thank you so much for the link. His artwork is amazing.

I'm very interested in the history & behind the scenes info about SoM, but I find that kind of information isn't easy to come by. I know that you guys here at Seikens are very knowledgeable in the subject matter so that's why I came here to ask about this painting.

[Kassidy]

We do what we can. Still very much in the process of documenting things like this.
Isono was also involved in the map illustration for SD3, and the main artwork for DoM (and in turn the WoM project, as seen on the WoM homepage and SD covers).

[invisibleham]

Have there ever been any video or magazine documentaries of the production that you know of? I guess this would have been around 1991-1993 depending on how long the game took to make.

Not knowing how to speak or read Japanese kind of puts a damper on trying to find stuff like this !

[Kassidy]

There's one set of screenshots somewhere here on the board of SoM in the beta stages. Not sure about any video documentary. None that I've seen at least.

[bastian]

Wow! I didn't know about Hiroo Isono before. What a treat to see all those Mana-esque paintings! He has such a distinctive art style. I really love it. I've had the SoM painting as my desktop for a while now. I'd like to swap it out for one of his non-Mana paintings, but those scans on his site are too small. :(

[Kassidy]

Bit of a necro-post, but sad news...

http://www.seikens.com/2013/06/rip-hiro-isono/

[Khyron]

Sheexy, Sad news, indeed, and definitely worth resurrecting this thread. That box art was our first glimpse into this world and certainly a compelling reason to drop $50 back in the day to give a "new" franchise a try. We were all rewarded well beyond even our wildest expectations (would you have ever thought you'd be playing this game 20 years later?). Time to release SD3 in the U.S. so that we can enjoy more of Hiroo Isono's work.