Worst cover I've ever seen:
I had this game when I was a kid, and I was so confused, because the game features a guy who wears full armor, you never see him out of the armor. I got this from Wikipedia:
For the game's cover, Acclaim hired Italian male model
Fabio Lanzoni to pose as Kuros; Fabio was presented on the cover bare-chested and without armor. When Zippo Games saw the image of the cover a week prior to its release, they were perplexed. According to Ste Pickford, "Our jaws hit the floor when we first saw this image (which was, being merely the developers, probably about a week before the game's release). Why on earth did they choose a photograph of a bare-chested barbarian to promote a game starring a knight in shining armour?" Pickford added that "We used it as an example of the lack of imagination of Americans", while suggesting that having an actual suit or armor would be too costly to use for a photo shoot.
The game's cover, which features Fabio, has received significant coverage from many gaming websites.
IGN listed
Ironsword as having one of the most notable covers in video game history, listing its cover as the 2nd best of all time behind
Ninja Golf. Conversely,
1UP.com listed
Ironsword as having one of the worst covers of all time, comparing it to the cover for
Mega Man.
GameSpy listed it as the 4th worst video game cover in history, saying that "thanks to the presence of Fabio on the cover, gamers got confused and thought they had accidentally picked up one of their mom's romance novels". In a retrospective of the NES for the console's 25th anniversary,
Nintendo Power wrote that "the game's quality will be forever overshadowed by Acclaim's choice of Fabio as the cover model".