It's art from an era when the art wasn't meant to represent the product in any concrete way. It's a lot like art from old Atari 2600 games, or text adventures:

It's art from an era when the art wasn't meant to represent the product in any concrete way. It's a lot like art from old Atari 2600 games, or text adventures: The product itself had either handfuls of pixels or screenfuls of text. Print that on the box, sucker... These days, the whole culture has changed, and people get annoyed when ads for games show pre-rendered cutscenes with graphics that are merely markedly better than what the game itself can accomplish, as opposed to being in a genre of art your hardware is physically incapable of reproducing.