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This was my attempt at bringing the spirit of the arcade artwork home to the 2600. I couldn't do much with the top portion near the scores because I didn't want to obstruct the path of the mothership. The backdrop image really lends itself well to giving that sense of immersion. The colors also work really well together. I am especially proud of this one, even if it is less elaborate that some of the others. Seeing it loaded up on my HD set always makes me smile. My pattern is to take out the first two invaders in every column heading right, pick off a couple on my way back left, wipe out the first column, perhaps the second depending on who is firing, leave eight on the screen so I can keep picking off motherships as long as possible, and then dispense the rest freestyle. Still, I can't seem to break 10,000. Oh well, at least it's fun to try.

Yes, the space birds are coming, and they want your planet. The bird graphics on the right hand side, as well as the glittery atari emblem, were captured from the commercial posted on youtube. Those on the left were taken from a scan of a magazine advertisement. The marquee is from a mid res scan of the most recognizable section of the box art. The background image tries to capture the storyline of battle in orbit.

I have found that in my attempts to embellish these 2600 games, that my reasearch has taken me across a wide variety of subjects to find appropriate source images. Night Driver is no different in that regard. The cars shown in the box art are fashioned closely after the 1975 BMW 3.0 CSL. The arcade version car, however, is modeled after the 1975 Alpha Romeo 33 TT12 formula one car. The car image in my artwork is taken from a Google Sketchup 3D model screencapture. That way I could try to match the perspective that the observer should have of the car. The courses, however, I mapped myself playing them over and over. Now, the points system actually has meaning. Even the manual didn't spell that one out. If only there was a mechanism within MESS to create a score based course progress argument for a lamp object, so that players could see their current position illuminated as a moving dot behind the map. Anyways, this game gets a bad rap because of the comparatively large paddle saturation zone, no spring-loaded centering, as well as the lack of any kind of visual cue that the steering input is not centered. There is, however, an audio cue. Anytime you hear the wheels squealing on a straightaway, you know that the car is about to slam to one side or another because the car is trying to turn. It also doesn't help that the course access road at the start of the race keeps the car centered despite non-centered steering input, only to slam the player once the first checkpoint is crossed. Despite these issues, Night driver is quite an accomplishment for its time.

This game is right up there with the best. Great gameplay, great sounds, and solid graphics for the time helped to bring arcade action home. The backdrop image was the closest I could get to the background image shown in other versions of this game, most notably for the TIA99. Despite the lack of stages 2 and 3 in the 2600 game, it is still a lot of fun to play.

It's Cosmic Carnival time! The bezel border is pulled right from the box graphic bubble dome light panel pattern. The rest is just composition from several source images, manipulated to match the scale and the lighting as best as I could manage at least. This is a fun fun game, and it is quite challenging to get a high score. Hope it sets the game mood for you too.

Mentioning the 2600 immediately conjures up certain games to mind. This is one of them. Combat is still a fun game to play, except if your older sibling still forces you to be the big plane. Well, at least with this bezel, you can get creamed in style. The trajectory lines on this bezel are actually strategic. They illustrate the not so obvious trajectories that your shots can take, and they look just as good over land as they do in the air. If you notice, in each of the three panes of the bezel there is a cleaned up version of the manual's joystick instruction graphic for that particular collection of games. I know, the planes are really supposed to be bi-planes, but to me they always made me think of WWII era fighters rather than the Wright Brothers.

To me this great game was in great need of enhancement. With some masking, the balloons finally look more like balloons and less like bricks, and the trampolines actually look like they can have some bounce to them.. With some simple front pane/back pane graphics from a 3D model, now the acrobats have a place to jump from instead of just popping out of thin air. The backdrop graphics just lend that touch of immersion to say, yeah, I am in the circus. Just like with all the Atari game artworks I have done, the font and the colors match those on the box

This game, like other Atari titles, is really a combination of multiple games that were released in the arcade right before the VCS was brought to market. In this case 2600 Canyon Bomber (1979) is a combination of Destroyer (1977) and, obviously, Canyon Bomber (1977). The arcade cabinet art for destroyer was quite elaborate, involving layers of both 2D and 3D objects. I had no way of trying to follow suit because the theme for destroyer would be out of place for canyon bomber and vice versa. So, I just decided to split the bezel right down the middle, neglect a backdrop, and spend the time tweaking the marquee graphics instead. Still I had to search long and hard for proper source images to compose the right hand pane.

I finished this one tonight. All the bezel images are from movie stills, and the marquee backdrop image is from the movie poster. I kicked up the game screen masking a notch, so I could fashion actual graphics out of what essentially amounted to placeholder blocks in the original release. In particular, I was able to make rescuer icons (lower left), an iron gate (lower right), survivor icons (upper left) and the hiding survivor/key icon at the top center. I hope you find that the smoke overlay and fire backdrop enhance rather than detract from the game's appearance. The smoke looks especially cool when the screen flashes as a rescuer dies or a tower is finished. Time is of the essence....

I just finished this one this evening. Here we have a great take on an awesome coin-op. Of course the marquee graphic, taken from a scan of a promotional mailing, takes center stage. The bezel image is composed from a series of four images. The enemy icons were traced and adjusted from a scan of one of those left-right split full page advertisements that they used to throw in a magazine asking, which player is doing better, left or right? The radar screen overlay is just pure composition and GIMP alpha to logo neon filtering. I love that plug-in. Anyways, I am especially happy about how this one turned out.

Yes, it's the greatest 2600 game ever made. Some might say that doesn't mean much nowadays, but we know different. The gorgeous sounds and the growingly frantic pace make it home arcade action at its best. All I did here was bring the story and the details of the manual and the comic book to the screen. As with all my artworks, I try to think about what the wizards at Atari would have done to embellish this in an upright cabinet format. The essential panes from the comic book story would certainly be there on the bezel, the intense cover image would feature prominently, and following in the great tradition of games such as Warlords and Asteroids Deluxe, a primarily black playfield would certainly be embellished by a backdrop image. Here I chose to compose one to capture the story of interplanetary war between the Yar and the Quotile.As it should, the neutral zone coincides with the debris field in the backdrop image, and kept at a low brightness so as not to detract or distract from the game graphics.

Certainly the true 2600 fanatics know that there is in fact a backstory for Super Breakout. Astronaut, on a shuttle, in deep space, finds his ship suddenly trapped in a dense series of energy fields. His only hope of escape? The most radical spacewalk ever, for a high stakes game of interstellar ping pong. Good thing he packed a raquet. The shuttle graphic in this artwork is in fact from the shuttle Enterprise, which was the test vehicle flown piggyback during the later years of the shuttle's development. It was recently flown that way one last time on a farewell tour before occupying its permanent home in the Smithsonian. There's no mistaking the styling of the cockpit windows and the nose on that prototype shuttle. The side graphics are from scans of the in-store promotional displays for this cartridge. The energy fields are 3D modeled, screen captured, and then manipulated in GIMP. The center backdrop graphic involved mapping those energy field models onto a cylinder, to get that feeling of the shuttle being cocooned within them. Now if I could only get my hands on the official Atari Super Breakout vinyl record......

Here is a unique shooter from Imagic, called Solar Storm. It has a pretty cool story, with elements of science thrown in for good measure. I love the fact that the ship is controlled with a paddle, and I also love the oscillating heat indicators on either side of the playfield because they lend an element of impending doom the faster and hotter that they pulse. All of the images are composed from multiple sources except for the enemy icons, pulled from an Imagic catalog scan, and the marquee image, which is straight from the front box art. Despite the rapid fire and analog controls, this is a TOUGH game, but I love playing it.

This artwork was inspired by super collider experiments, and in particular, the unique particle signatures that are recorded from a collision, four of which adorn the corners of the outer bezel area. The image in the middle is an actual representation of the positions of probes and injectors around a spherical reactor chamber. The wiring and scaffolding is from images of the facility at CERN. There is a lot going on in this game, so I found a way to embed some gameplay info into the backdrop image, such as the areas right next to the control rods and the walls around the bonus chambers. The control rod text font is derived from the original coin op graphics in that same location.

Warlords is a great game, and it is still a lot of fun to play with friends. But I was always annoyed with how the ball didn't bounce at the edge of the screen which made it difficult for me to gauge a good ricochet, and the individual bricks are highly irregular. Some are big and fat, others long and thin, and still others small and stout. This artwork changes all that and immensely improves my enjoyment of this game. The backdrop is a reworked version of the arcade original. Thanks to atariage I had access to the right fonts and the quality scan of the cover art.

One of the all-time classics on the 2600. I was always inspired by the cover art for this one. I decided to try and recreate elements from the Mazeon complex, and of course put some of the awesome artwork in the manual to good use. The central green computer wall border was modeled in 3d, and then screen captured with perspective enabled. The floor tile pattern is all composed.

I vectorized the title graphic off of a low res image I found through Google search, and the rest came from pictures that inspire thoughts of oceans in space and flowing energy fields (backdrop image). I love this game. There is so much intricacy and potential for strategy. I knew it would be a great game after sitting down and suffering through the first few hours of dying repeatedly and learning all the ins and outs of the enemies and the rules. Instead of leaving that for others to noodle through, I decided to organize that on the bezel, a-la arcade instruction cards.

Xype makes excellent games, like this fine port of an arcade classic. It stands well enough on its own, but to me, this kicks it up a notch. A lot of image composition went into this one from a wide variety of sources. The enemy Russian sub in the lower right is in fact an Akula class sub, the rival submarine to the Seawolf class.

This is my homage to Nukey's incredible work with Pac-Man 8k. I took the images from manual scans, cleaned them up in GIMP, added some masking and other embellishments through layering and alpha blending, and voila. Nukey, this one is for you.