Phalanx is a 1991 space shooter video game developed by ZOOM Inc. and Kemco for the Sharp X68000, Super Nintendo Entertainment System and Game Boy Advance. The game was released for the X68000 in Japan in 1991, for the SNES in Japan on August 7, 1992 and in North America in October 1992, and for the GBA in Japan on October 26, 2001, in Europe on November 23, 2001 and in North America on December 27, 2001.
Phalanx is infamous [according to whom?] for the incongruous box art in its American release: it displays a bearded, elderly man dressed in overalls, wearing a fedora and playing a banjo while a futuristic spaceship flies in the background. The popular media site IGN named it their fifth "Most Awesome Cover" in a top 25 countdown on their website.[1] The box art designers later admitted that they had deliberately chosen this theme in order to attract the customer with something original, considering there were many space shooters in the market that looked alike.[citation needed] The Game Boy Advance release redesigned the cover in favor of a prominent spaceship image.
