On the bottom there, that says... "Theamston"?

Theakston aka Greg Theakston: http://www.angelfire.com/ny5/telengard/heroes.htm

It's like that article was written just for the purpose of answering my question. First paragraph starts, with gushing about the cover art and the man who drew it! And while I was blindly googling possible interpretations of the signature, you probably just googled "Telengard+cover+art" and pulled it right up 8)

Rats! We only have cover art on file for a version for which we have no credits on file, so for me to add him I either have to suss out the c64 credits from somewhere, or come up with DOS cover art. (or figure out which version the reviewer was playing -- looks like anything BUT dos 8)

Rats part 2 -- last year the programmer died! Just stumbled upon his website, which he was updating until the end. But at that time he was distributing the game for free and provides much supplementary insight into the circumstances of its creation and that of his earlier game DND: "I had one very interesting side trip when I was asked to come out to Maynard, MA to the Mill at Digital Equipment Corporation to port DND to their DECSystem-20. The engineers there were very big fans of the game."

Don't worry, I found cover art. Still, that death is lousy news to start your day with.

I recognized that it looks like Theakston (you wrote Theamston) to me, the signature. So the google-key was Theakston and telengard, cover art wasn't required ;)