I thought I'd share the sites I regularly check for my cover-making needs. I'm sure that some of these are known, but I figured that collecting them in one place would still be a worthwhile endeavour. If you know of any good ones that I didn't list, feel free to share it too.
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Fan wikis — I'm not going to exhaustingly list each and everyone one of these, but know that fan-run, series-dedicated wikis can be an
excellent source for hi-res art and scans. Not all of them are useful, but a lot are. A couple of standout ones are the
Mario Wiki and the
Zelda Wiki.
Kawaii Art Zone — An old, defunct site, but one that still has its uses. KAZ's heyday was in the mid-late 00s, and it collected art from then-recent games; and as those games have since had their press kits and official sites deleted, KAZ has become one of the few places on the internet with that art. Particularly good for niche RPGs on the GBA and PS2. You need an account to actually view the images, however.
Launchbox Games Database — This place has logos for
everything, always transparent and generally high resolution (often
very high resolution). I figure they must be vectored by hand, or perhaps run through some upscaling software, but the results are great. The one annoying thing about the place is that saving files off of it is awkward: their slideshow software prevents it, so you have to access the file directly by monkeying around with Inspect Element (registered users may be able to save images without that workaround, I'm not sure— I haven't registered).
PidgiWiki — Just found this place recently; it seems to be aspiring to be the one-stop-shop for hi-res artwork, promo material, logos and so on. Somewhat awkward to navigate (there don't seem to be any
pages, so you have to search things manually and follow links to categories), but it does look to be a good— and growing— repository. Already found some stuff here I haven't seen elsewhere.
Sega Retro —
The site for Sega games (both published by Sega or available on Sega's consoles). Not only do they have hi-res scans for
everything, in all regions, but they are constantly unearthing and archiving the original art— as recently as last year one user uploaded a Dreamcast-era presskit with dozens of art, some of which have (AFAIK) never been available at that resolution.
Vampire Killer — Still, to my knowledge, the best place for Castlevania art. Focused on Ayami Kojima's art, but some classic stuff still makes its way in.
And for when there just
aren't assets in high enough quality, there's web apps that can help with that.
Vector Magic has long been a help to me as a way to making logos larger (though it really only works for logos with a limited palette). Meanwhile, AI upscalers have shown impressive results in making images larger without turning them into blurry, indistinct messes;
Waifu2X (ignore the terrible name) and
Vertexshare are two free ones to try (Waifu2X works best on simpler, anime-styled artwork; Vertexshare is the better choice for 3D renders).
