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Nope, the poster was only using scans of game releases. Mainly the manuals of the Korean and Taiwanese version of MI2, plus several box scans. If I had access to scans of the original painting, the quality would be much, much higher. Noteworthy: The Korean manual seems to be the only available source of an unobstructed "LeChuck's Revenge" banner.

The more sources you post, the more impressed I am of the work you’re doing, Laserschwert. You go through such great lengths to get as many sources as you can. After that, it must be hard work puzzling everything together as neatly as you do, and then colour correcting it and making sure the quality of the final image is consistent. In dutch we call such a thing ‘a monk’s job’, because it’s so detailed and strenuous. I’m glad we have you in our community. I’m curious, how many layers do your Photoshop files have, and do you keep the sources in the PSD’s ‘clean’ so you can swap them out when better images become available?

It could be cool to have a raw or unedited version for studying purposes, the details in the brush strokes are really cool to see . Paintings even on paper don't deteriorate too much if they are handled mildly responsibly, that means not trowing them to gather dust and humidity in an open space. The more delicate pieces are the ones made with markers though, if they are not covered from light sources (specially the sun) the colors fade away really fast. Watercolors and acrylic paints can be displayed without problems other than having the paper yellowing (direct sun light without UV filters can yellow the paper, also depends on the paper quality too), gouaches can be displayed too but a drop of water can do a bit of damage if it's not sealed or covered. Oils don't have much of a problem, usually the varnish is the one that gets really yellow and dark and it can be removed and replaced, but I think modern varnishes have less yellowing problems. *On a side note, I was looking for a better version of the Edison's portrait but couldn't find one, I only found a photo posted by Purcell a few years ago, I'm guessing this one was never made public, right? So I took the photo and cleaned it up the best I could and turned out to have really nice colors and details I didn't know it had, it's a shame it looks a bit blurry though, we might need to send a ninja to take photos wherever the original painting is haha!.

Yep this is the most common. There are digital cameras made at least partially to specialize in this sort of high res studio setup, which slightly vibrate the image censor and take multiple shots to create gigantic mega-res composite photos from a locked down tripod setup. And before digital as far as I know large format film cameras were commonly used, with the resulting shots preserved as slides or transparencies (instead of prints) to preserve as much detail as possible for reproduction. There are surely slides or transparencies of all the box art out there somewhere as it was almost definitely the format used for mailing a copy to magazines for ads, and to international publishers, before print design went fully digital, but who knows where they’d be. Deep in old filing cabinets if they aren’t throw out.

I believe Steve sold that painting to a collector and - surprise - it has vanished into hiding without a trace. Collectors are often very bad sharers, unfortunately.