Homebrew Art, part 5 - Ultra SCSIcide

Entry posted by Nathan Strum February 7, 2014

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Ultra SCSIcide (2005)

UltraSCSIcide is Joe Grand's update to his classic twitch game SCSIcide.

This was my third contest win in a row, and I took a completely different approach to this one - photography.

I came up with a couple of sketches in Painter - initially just a line drawing, then roughing in some color. The flames are an effects brush in Painter. My idea for it was straightforward - Ultra SCSIcide was a frenetically-paced game that takes place inside a hard drive, so I'd show the drive blowing itself apart in a catastrophic failure. The fact that I'd seen a large number of hard drives die over the years had nothing to do with my taking a sort-of "revenge" on them. (Okay… maybe a little.)

With that, it was time to turn to photography (and a Canon Powershot G6).

The trick with photographing anything metal or shiny, is controlling the reflections (take note, anyone wanting to shoot Imagic boxes). To that end you need to control the light and environment that you're shooting in. Stand lights help immeasurably if you have access to them, so you can better control shadows and glare. For the environment, hanging sheets of paper will do the trick. Just keep adjusting them until the reflection in the metal is only reflecting what you want it to:

I shot the drive (a dead Seagate Cheetah) both with the cover on and off, and from a variety of distances and angles, so I would have a lot to work with in Photoshop. This is the final photo for this label:

From there, I used Photoshop to make the fire (using Alien Skin's EyeCandy) and debris, and Painter for the sparks shooting off. The logos and icons were created in FreeHand.

I'd given some thought to trying to actually blow a hole in the drive somehow, but since I didn't have an unlimited supply of drives to play with, I figured Photoshop was my best bet.

This label still holds up pretty well, although I'd treat the text differently now. The slanting of the font (Data Seventy) was just a gimmick, and not particularly good design. But I do still like the use of the four icons for Pixels Past, AtariAge and the two controllers. I wanted to do something different than just calling that all out with text, and this unified them nicely.

Contest Entries

So, the usual round of Atari-style labels were entered:

This one was the one chosen as the winner - there were a couple differences made for the final cart - the background was changed from pink to orange, and the copyright was incorporated into the edge of the hard drive:

Another variation. The reason for the pink is that if you zoom out far enough, it eventually becomes blue. However, none of the labels were cropped that way, so… pink. Oh well. :roll:

Another design I wanted to do featured the inside of the drive. A more literal interpretation of the game, showing the bits moving across the surface, and the read/write head showering sparks as it slammed into the drive platter.

So a quick rough in Painter later, and I took the photos I needed of the interior.

There were a few things I had to do to this. First, I had to use a radial blur on the hub to make it look like it was spinning at high speed. Then, I had to add the bits and the paths they followed. For that I used FreeHand, since it's perfect for something so geometric.

I added the rings in Photoshop and lightened/blurred them as needed, and took the end results into Painter to add the sparks. I like this label better than the one that actually won the contest, but I'm not about to lodge any complaints about it.

And the Atari variants (which give a better look at the whole disk):

For the final variation on this, I did a sideways label. I'll have to try this in a contest again someday. I think it's a cool idea to have a landscape label, and as far as I know, it hasn't been done yet on a 2600 game. The image did get used however, since Joe Grand wanted to feature it in the manual. So it was kind of like winning first and second place.

In what can only be deemed a blatant rip-off homage to one of SCSIcide's earlier labels that featured the top of a hard drive, I decided to do one of the underside.

The label started out as a scan of the Cheetah:

Then it was just a lot of Photoshop work to rework the chips and circuit traces to get all of the necessary text on it. Joe mentioned after the contest some of his reasons behind what he chose, and he mentioned that this was too similar to his earlier hard-drive-themed label. I can certainly see that, but what bothers me about it, is that you can't read "Ultra". It's hidden too much within the circuitry. But hey, live and learn.

For the final entries, I came up with the idea of showing a hard drive inserted into a 2600 in place of a cartridge. In hindsight it doesn't really work conceptually because it might imply this is some sort of storage device instead of a game. But I still think the photos look cool.

For the setup, I built a cardboard stand that put the hard drive at the same height and angle a 2600 cart would be at:

Then, I photographed both items separately, carefully making sure the drive would end up in the same location the cartridge was in:

Then, I used Photoshop to blend them together, and add Joe's name to the front of the console:

And the resulting label:

I also shot a close-up version using the same process.

And of course, the inevitable Atari-style variations. However, I stayed with the Data Seventy font since I felt it was so strongly associated with the previous game:

And finally, this wasn't an official submission, but just a joke I couldn't resist posting in the forum because of the previous two contests:

I'd mentioned previously that my label submissions at some point got out-of-hand. Believe it or not… this isn't it. Not yet. That's another story.

The upside of winning contests (besides the fame and women, of course), is getting free copies of the games, plus store credit for even more games. But in some cases they included more stuff. Man Goes Down came with an AtariVox voice module, and Ultra SCSIcide came with a Stelladaptor - which allowed you to plug Atari 2600 controllers into a USB port and use them with Stella. Very cool, but sadly neither are available through AtariAge anymore.

The downside of winning contests (three in-a-row at this point) was that I felt that it was starting to discourage others from entering. That's the last thing I'd want, because I wouldn't want to be discouraged myself, and I love good competition and seeing all of everyone else's ideas.

But I'd start losing soon enough.

But that's another…

...well, you know.