(I bet there was some Frogger marketing guy who kept insisting, "can't you make the screenshot just a little bit bigger?" And the hand-drawn mock screenshot was the eventual compromise to make him shut up.)
"That machine that we had at Work House in Tokyo looked like a VCR or something. It was huge. They'd hook it up to the game system, and then it would print out a picture that was maybe four postage stamps big. It wasn't even as large as a Polaroid. It would print out this beautiful color picture, and then these guys would sit there and take their X-Acto knives and cut out the trim, and then they'd paste them onto this larger board, and make this huge board that was the entire map."
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/183233/nintendo_power_...
http://www.classiccarstodayonline.com/wp-content/uploads/201...
The style kind of goes, big headline, then 2-4 fairly detailed paragraphs about the product. You never see that any more. The video games always followed the same template:
CAN YOU HANDLE THE ACTION
Are you ready for craziest alien battles on the Frobozz Computer System? Then play Foobar 2000, the ultimate adventure! You'll face dastardly demons and high speed challenges, sure to make you ask for more!
The business software and hardware ads look very similar. Image search "software computer ad 80s 90s" if you don't believe me.
It's just what was popular in advertising graphic design back then - it's not particular to video games.
The Atari cartridge artwork which was parodied by Panic https://panic.com/blog/panic-retro-art/
