Okay so ever since the 2600+ came out and my desire to want to be a part of the 2600/7800 community started, i came to the realization that obviously these days its extremely hard to get some of the more obscure or sought after 2600/7800 titles i wanted to play on my system without getting a custom cartridge, which honestly is really fun sounding! I can have my own copy of a game like "Red Sea Crossing" or prototypes like "Sinistar" and even hacks like "Wolfenstein 2600" with the exact kind of label i wanted and since as of now i live in the same town as AtariAge themselves, i could get this game by the next day after shipping for a fairly tempting price.

And the best site to get most of the work done for me was labelmaker2600.com, it had nearly all the 2600 Atari cartridge templates and it was easy to use, i was quite satisfied with it. But it missed my favorite label! And of course there were other third party publisher labels i wanted to replicate. Like Activision, so i'd like to show you the label and style i'm talking about.

The "2600 Red Label/Jr Style" from the mid-late 1980's to early 90's

It's a bit bland and for those who were atari fans in the 80's is kind of seen as the "Budget/Dollar Store Era", but i felt that especially the Logo/Header and the red coloring were truly fitting for the console, and i loved how well they would mesh on the shelf, i really loved how the end labels had the system listed + Catalog #NO with the name boldly in the top.

I thought since the 2600+ was bringing the 2600 and 7800 together again and bringing new life to both platforms, i thought this kind of 7800 esque 2600 logo + Distinct Red Labeling was something i wanted to standardize with a template so anybody with a basic photo editor such as myself could make a custom label, send it to AtariAge and get it back with the confidence that it would unify their game collection, that may be a very neurodivergent thing to want to do, but yeah it is... So what?

So i whipped up something in about 30 minutes as a concept for people to mess around with and emailed the owner of the 2600labelmaker website with my idea, posted the question on atariage and left it there for the month of June.

I eventually got a reply from the owner of the website, but due to the fact that i haven't gotten a response yet on if i should publicly state what he said i will say that it was on the table at one point but isn't possible for him to do, please dont message him about it though. If i get anything i will let you know. So unfortunately i was left with this very off, quick reconstruction from a JPG of a 2600 Red Label, in gimp, made in 30 minutes as a proof of concept that honestly needed far more work than i put in it even as a proof of concept and thus i left that there...

You may notice that the font from the original red labels and mine are different, even that 2600 logo above that i used as an example has a different font if you look at the 6 in 2600, so here comes a little interlude about how hard i tried to search for this mysterious font and how it proved fruitless.

Essentially it is a custom hybrid of sorts of Futura Bold and Futura Bold Condensed, slim 0s, the number 6 with an oval hole. Minor differences, this seems to trip up a lot of people not just myself as seen below with this custom Donkey Kong cart, this is just a very mysterious custom typeface that i have yet to find a perfect match of

But the weirder thing is the 2600 Jr box and oddly Midnight Magic on the 2600 use the standard Futura Bold font...

and oddly the current day atari uses the unknown typeface to this day for new 2600 releases, which iimplies they at least have a high quality image of the "2600/Atarian Futura" font or the 2600 logo in that typeface, but i never bothered to ask aboout this.

Okay all of that aside, despite not finding the exact font, me and (mostly) a user on the AtariAge discord (DragonGrafx-16) found one close enough, and when i found out about the Midnight Magic thing, i felt at peace finally, so here it is again.


 

How lovely, i apologize for kinda tommy tallaricoing your contribution, but if i knew your user here, i'd just @ you instead with sole credit, my mother is indeed very proud.

Okay ENOUGH, for real...
In between my rabbithole for finding this typeface and that original attempt in june, i decided to use what was available to me at the time with the 2600labelmaker's silver label generator and Frankenstein my own hybrid label! Effectively meeting the best of both worlds.

The Silver Label is a beloved template for 2600 carts, it co-existed with the red label for awhile but Silver came before Red! So it's extremely iconic and uniform, and seemingly much more prefered to the red label

and i do like this label, however i think the silver better fits the 7800 and i feel like it'd be too similar to that console's label, even if the red label format was the exact same as the 7800 label, the coloring made it stand out, taking the red from the logo/banner and making it THE label for 2600 in my opinion, not to mention the end labels, while i liked their boldness, i preferred the extra details on the end labels of the red carts, makes them fit nicely on a shelf to me.

But i did like the rainbow header and a few other features on the Silver Label so i decided to try to mix a bit of the late silver label with the coloring and end labels of the red labels after being inspired by the labels made by @ZippyOasys to make this middle ground label, and i was very happy with the results

i would like to make alterations to the design and font choices but this was very satisfying to make and to see the results of.

And eventually around this time i also decided to use my printers scanner at the time to scan two of my red label games, which at the time were my only ones, but honestly i'm glad i chose the two i did, Dark Chambers and Ikari Warriors, it seems like with the final 90's games they changed the logo again so it was really interesting to see the differences between the two, although i wish i had done a better job of keeping them fully aligned in the scanner as i still feel like they were crooked, as with a lot of the JPGs i used as reference material.

This image is almost 77 MBs.... Sadly my printer no longer works so i'm afraid i can't try again or add scans of other games, but i am glad to have scanned them at all at this quality.

Also around this time i toiled around with tackling my favorite style of activision labels (The Blue Ones) and trying to make them fit this kind of "New Hybrid Style", unfortunately as far as i know, Gimp doesnt seem to have shape tools or something so it took me a while to get this down to a point i was satisfied with, and eventually i just used it as the artwork for the 2600labelmaker and just made the background blue, although i am pretty pleased with the end labels.

i couldn't find the exact font that the blue labels use, which i will put down below but i think i did my best to show this idea of a less boring Blue Label Activision template concept.

Again, designed for Atari style 2600 carts in mind since, those are the ones i'd expect most to use for custom carts, as AtariAge does. I do hope to revisit this idea eventually, as i did want to experiment with alternate color choices instead of blue for certain games like Black for Ghostbusters or Green for Pitfall!

And as a one off i did a quick label for a hypothetical demake of the Sunsoft NES Batman game in the hybrid red label for 2600 since i felt like something like that would make total sense as some kind of late era 2600 batman game, then somebody told me that somebody already did their own demo of that, so i presented them what i made. But i'll post it here too because you can never have enough images.

I did not make an End Label for that was the most time consuming part, and when i made this label, i didnt know that game existed so i didnt think much of it and by the time i did i was likely already tired, much apologies to the atari wizard behind the game.

But in August i decided after making my best PNGs of the 2600 logos as i will post both PNGs one more time below (you havent seen the other one so) based on the cartridge scans i did before, i thought i should try to make a template to AtariAge's specifications including bleed and cut dimensions, now maybe i could've made the bleed a different color to make it less confusing but i'm never sure about much of anything really, so, while i still feel like theres much to improve on with the current template i am excited by the results and propositions that this endeavor may provide, i just dont think i can do this alone.

And with enough teasing and motivational speech, i bring you the label template as of now, Main Label 1.1 and End Label 1.0

AGAIN i need to say this includes "Bleed" so it may look like everything is too small, this is not how it would look on a cartridge, see the atariage store's custom cartridge listing for more info, i will say i wish i put in sample front label text (obviously in a lower opacity to make it easier to write over) and the end label has a few errors in terms of how i used too much bold fonts or non bold fonts intermixed with eachother, its a mess basically 😅, but i hope to get an updated 1.2/1.1 versions of the labels with tips from the community on my thread in the 2600 forum here, its gone stagnate with replies since june and i really need help with my skills to help advance progress on it, i am also hoping to do more "Hybrid Label" tests as well, i dont see that going way.

But thats my progress on trying to DIY this. Thank you for reading my blog entry, more will come soon, i recommend following the blog but mostly my thread on the 2600 forums dedicated to the template, thats where i will mostly be posting this stuff in or updates on that mostly. Send your tips there too!

But thats all. Thanks again.