The Bad Game

In June 2025, I got in touch with Dimensiones Ocultas Publishing, coincidentally at the very moment they were looking for someone passionate about horror and video games to illustrate the cover of the novel they were planning to release that October: The Bad Game (Juego perverso), a book by Adam Millard, author of October Boys (Un Halloween de muerte). The story revolves around a mysterious arcade machine that possesses those who dare to play it.

Inspired by that premise, I wanted to capture in the illustration a supernatural, oppressive, and eerie atmosphere that placed the arcade machine at the center, evoking the kinds of cursed-object stories that Stephen King readers know so well—from Christine and From a Buick 8 to the short story The Mangler.

At first glance, the arcade cabinet looks like a normal machine, yet subtle details hint at its age and unsettling nature. For the design, I took inspiration from the structure of the classic Missile Command, which lacks the usual joystick and instead features three fire buttons and a trackball. I heightened the sense of chaos by adding more buttons than usual. From the control panel oozes a black, viscous liquid dripping onto the floor—completely unnoticed by the player. This detail, together with the greenish mist in the background, suggests that escape is impossible once the machine has caught you in its grasp.

The side vinyls display psychedelic, amorphous shapes—a visual manifestation of the player’s disturbed mental state while interacting with the machine. The young player’s serious, rigid expression was meant to convey the feeling of facing the unknown: trapped in a potentially deadly experience, poised at that fragile threshold between fascination and revulsion. The goal was to make the viewer suspect that, at any moment, something ancient and demonic might emerge from the machine’s core to drag the player toward an uncertain fate.

For the player’s expression, I was inspired by a promotional image from Annabelle, recreating a possessed stare that turns directly toward the observer with just a tilt of the head. I also experimented with distorting the boy’s face using a “glitch” effect, but ultimately decided to apply it to the background instead, maintaining a subtler and more immersive sense of digital malfunction.