To understand why so many games veterans were dismayed at the news that artist Oliver Frey had died this week, you first need to understand the changing face of games media.
Frey was one of the founders of Newsfield, the publisher largely responsible for the explosion of gaming magazines in the early 1980s. The company started out publishing a mail order ZX Spectrum games catalogue which quickly evolved into a newsstand magazine called Crash. Other seminal titles, such as Commodore mag Zzap!64 and the Amstrad specific Amtix, soon followed.
This was an era when players had virtually no access to information about new games prior to release. No internet rumours, no social media leaks. If it wasn't covered in a magazine, it might as well not exist. Even when a game was covered in their pages there was a good chance it would involve little more than a handful of black and white screenshots. Often, these were literally photographs of the screen, reproduced on grainy paper. Working out what a game actually looked like was a dark art.