FirebrandX has just stumbled upon an old hard drive of his, containing seventy gigabytes of high quality scans of Super Nintendo box art, cartridges and even the game PCB’s (example below). This archive of scans was all done by the late Near, who was a legend in SNES development; Lower quality versions of this archive have been floating around, but none at the full 600DPI. The scans are at least ten years old, but with Near’s attention to detail, look like they could have been done yesterday!
More info: https://www.patreon.com/posts/nears-original-57250631
Download the entire archive: https://archive.org/details/near-snes-scans-png
Individual Folder View: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1ej48NB99R4K3KbaIBEPPdrafq4j6ywcR / https://archive.org/download/near-snes-scans-png
This find means a great deal to a lot of people, for many different reasons. On the surface, SNES fans everywhere will appreciate this archive and I’m sure it’ll be referenced for years to come. Anyone familiar with Near, knows this goes deeper though – After their tragic passing in June of this year, suddenly having a huge archive of theirs appear is both a welcome surprise, as well as a reminder of the dedication and detail that was always synonymous with Near’s work.
Here’s a low resolution example of the findings – This is about 50% size and compressed to a jpg, vs the original PNG and is not a representation of the quality, only the contents:
An archive of Near's high resolution scans has been found by @FBXGargoyle and will be available for download. I expect it will be missing some of the box scans that I was missing, but this is a great day for preservation. https://t.co/eciczMUvq9
— SNES Central (@snescentral) October 10, 2021
Near's Original Lossless 600DPI SNES Scans! https://t.co/f8aVznBvhL
— FirebrandX 😈 ♈️ (@FBXGargoyle) October 11, 2021
