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A stupid twist on the Nintendo cab that was fun to draw: Pokemon Red and Blue

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TheGreatRedDragon:
(and Green)

This is purely hypothetical, since dedicating an arcade cabinet to a Gameboy game is pretty dumb and dedicating three (or more) cabinets to Gameboy games is absolutely ludicrous (hence it being here instead of in Project Announcements). But Wyo's excellent NES-based designs inspired the hell out of me to try my hand at something similar, and the idea of applying that concept to a shrunken down bartop (Haruman's Minitendo to be precise) to represent the portable Gameboy stuck in my brain. That, combined with a desire to work on my Illustrator skills with lots and lots of tedious vector tracing and a childhood admiration for the early work of Ken Sugimori led me to by far the biggest game of my childhood.





I started with just a general "Pokemon" theme, but that quickly transformed into designing three sets of artwork for the first three versions. From there I decided on a monochromatic theme for each cabinet. Thinking back to the marketing of the time, the greatest appeal of the first generation was the novelty of the Pokemon themselves and how many of them there were. Aside from that there wasn't much theme or narrative to the games other than a quasi-futuristic setting, so I stuck with bold colors and long lines, leaving it to the Pokemon art to be the real eye candy.

Deciding what Pokemon to use was an ordeal. I limited myself only to the art Sugimori created for Red and Blue, which is the second batch of Gen 1 art he drew, because they're the most dynamic drawings he did, and I didn't want any duplicate Pokemon to show up. I also wanted to avoid legendary Pokemon for being too obvious of a choice, I wanted to focus more on the grunts. The three box mascots were the obvious picks for the sideart, but the bezel and marquee art was wide open. When I figured out the basic design for the bezels I knew I needed fifteen Pokemon. Since there were fifteen types in Gen 1 I decided that each type should be represented. I also wanted to respect the original version exclusives, so for example Magmar could only appear on the Green bezel (I went by the Japanese distribution). Juggling that with color coordination and pose meant it took a while to figure out what I wanted there, and some of the art I made went unused, but I'm happy with the end result.



The marquees were easier to figure out. The three starters on the left, and on the right I used the rival's non-starter Pokemon of the same type. Fitting everything into such a narrow band was dicey but I was able to make it work without much compromise.



I considered putting the second form starters on the control panels but I couldn't make it work. The overlay art is based on the Donkey Kong design but tweaked to feel more modern, metropolitan, fast, pop, etc. Figuring out what how to label the buttons was tricky, because just putting a letter in there didn't look right but with the games being RPGs there is no set command either. I went with labels I found in a manual that made enough sense. For the instruction box I tried a few things but just pulled the original blurb from the back of the Gameboy boxes for that extra shot of nostalgia (with a few tweaks).



I still have to do some tweaking, and I want to make labels for the two admin buttons ("Exit" and "Turbo"), but so far I'm really happy with how they look. Will I ever actually make them? Maybe, maybe not. With some mulling and experimentation the idea of adapting the games to an arcade isn't as dumb to me as it was before. It's not like a console game where it's meant to be played with a controller. I tried them with my fightstick and the games play about as well with arcade controls as they do with a keyboard or controller, none of which are really like playing on a Gameboy. But playing on a Gameboy has numerous disadvantages, so why not make something special to play these games on? And for a while I've wanted to make a personalized ROM hack of FireRed/LeafGreen to, among other things, make it possible to complete the Pokedex without trading. One of these cabinets would be a fun venue for that: "Pokemon: Arcade Version." Still pretty dumb, and there are greater priorities right now, but I think it's a fun kind of dumb. Others may not agree, and I know I may be facing excommunication for even bringing it up.  :lol

Malenko:
They all look great, the only thing I'd change is to drop the word "version" from the marquess.  :cheers:

TheGreatRedDragon:

--- Quote from: Malenko on August 26, 2018, 03:52:02 pm ---They all look great, the only thing I'd change is to drop the word "version" from the marquess.  :cheers:

--- End quote ---

Thanks!

I wanted to put the actual game title somewhere on the cabinet and it didn't look right on the CPO, bezel or sideart. Not that it's really necessary, because you can take one look at the cabinet and know what game it is (kinda like the White Album), but I liked incorporating one more little piece from the box art.

Malenko:

--- Quote from: TheGreatRedDragon on August 26, 2018, 04:51:43 pm ---I wanted to put the actual game title somewhere on the cabinet and it didn't look right on the CPO, bezel or sideart. Not that it's really necessary, because you can take one look at the cabinet and know what game it is (kinda like the White Album), but I liked incorporating one more little piece from the box art.

--- End quote ---

I agree, but colloquially they are known as pokemon red, blue, green just like in your title :p 

I'd replace the nintendo logo on the CPO with "red version" etc , and I'd probably keep the pokeballs red on all 3 as well. Still, they look factory. good clean lines.

yotsuya:
Thank you for understanding and demonstrating the intricacies of design concepts instead of just plastering every single Pokémon all over the cab. Kudos! :cheers:

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