Jacob Fryxelius, designer of Terraforming Mars, reveals some of the easter eggs hidden in Terraforming Mars in this weekly article series.
When Isaac created the logos and artwork for Terraforming Mars, many small details were put in that may not be obvious to most people. There are references, cameos, corporation logos, logos from our printing partners, real landmarks, and more. Now that Easter is upon us, we want to give you a taste of this, so we will present some of them in this article series, starting with everything Ecoline.
We like small actors playing big roles, and Ecoline is one such example. It has a typical sea shell icon as its logo, and with an interesting note that it also symbolizes a flexible fuse in the field of electronics. These meanings combine to say that Ecoline engineers lifeforms to withstand the harsh environment on Mars.
The tag line ‘Evolving Your World’ just seemed appropriate.
Ecoline is one of the more featured corporations in the game art, and can be found on cards such as Grass, Earth Office, Zeppelins, Micro-Mills, and Soil Factory (and Lunar Exports and Venus Soils from the expansions).
The picture from Grass, done by brother Daniel, was once suggested as part of the box cover art, but Isaac made a much more fitting art for the box. We’ll talk more about that next week.
Micro-Mills represents the first terraforming method employed in the Red Mars book series by Kim Stanley Robinson. Soil Factory includes 3 cameos, which are just as difficult to spot as the corporation logos, while Earth Office features 6 corporation logos, 2 of which are not released yet. Zeppelins has the tagline on its side, also fairly difficult to see. These things were done for our own entertainment, but also for anyone taking out the microscope to scrutinize our pictures. Isaac hid things even I didn’t know existed in the artwork… trying to keep some of the fun for himself!
As you can see, there are even more things to see than can actually be seen.
