"It was back in 1985, I was 10 years old and found out there was a Commodore 64 laying on my table. Along with it stood a lousy Phonemark tape drive, year later replaced by a noisy 1541 toaster. Not much after that piles of disks filled my tables, most of them stuffed inside boring blank covers. Disks with the wares took rounds in our school, and it was more than obvious that their covers soon started to contain small messages from one to another, bad english and pencil-drawn logos of 80's heavy metal bands. Later, after seeing the first demos, we soon found ourselves having an own group whose name was about to be scrawled just about everywhere. Covers with different kind of logos were drawn by couple of us, the best of them got photocopied and spread around. Those days we had already got our first contacts abroad and along them came their covers, of course much more professional than the ones we had drawn for fun. Soon there was a cover for every group, later for almost every release. This all lead to that exclusively drawn covers became inseparable part of swapping and dealing of demos and wares. Some of the people (like I) found them almost as interesting as the wares itself and tried to collect every single one that got released. Though plain mail swapping seems to be quite much dead these days stuff mainly being spread online, there still exist people who every now and then release a new cover. Somewhere back in the room I started making experiments with C64 there still is a drawer filled with hundreds of disk covers I collected.

I do not know who drew, copied and spread the first cover, and it does not really matter - for sure that same progress took place in different locations at the same time. What's more important, is that covers offered us free format to develop our skills in drawing and designing; simple the fact that the cover you had drawn would end up in someone's hands being 15th+ lousy photocopy set demands for your technique. For me disk covers were the first thing to draw on paper that had some kind of purpose - they were meant to be used and viewed and because of that it was also an effort to draw one. When now looking back the mail-art stuff done in the 90's, it looks mainly just embarrassing. Lousy motives, rip-offs, bad taste and pure teenage idiotism. Still, as these days making my living as an illustrator and graphic designer, I do feel I'm in debt of gratitude to the cover scene. Hopefully there will someday be comprehensive site based on disk covers, this one is our contribution to that."

10.3.2003, Electric

This site contains all the covers that we in Extend have done so far and some of which people have done for us - download, print, cut, paste, add to your collection or spread to your friends. The site serves as an archive for Extend related disk covers, so please don't fill our mailbox with scans of others. However, if you do have something we should include on this page, please inform us about it... feedback is appreciated. We're not in for nostalgia, this site will include some new covers every now and then.

Credits:

Covers by: Duce, Electric, Junkie, Atte, FX, Suicidal, Azag-Thot, Asunta and Jamhair.
Site design by Duce with traditional nagging by Electric.

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