I'm not sure where this post should go. I've been a long time lurker, but I'm finally adding a cabinet to the basement. Nothing thrilling, just a UAII and a SlikStik classic. If this should be moved to somewhere else...move away.
I've been a professional graphic artist/video producer for about 10 years, and I work in Illustrator and Photoshop almost daily. I began thinking about what I wanted to do for a theme for my cabinet and it took me a long time to decide. The sky was the limit, but how do you capture the excitement that you felt about the arcade in one cabinet design?
I thought about one of the cabinets with a million different characters on it from popular games, and some of those are really nice, but I just didn't like the idea of mixing artistic styles that much. That lead me to thinking back on some of my favorite movies/games of the 80s. I'm a big Star Wars fan, and I have some nice memorabilia, but that didn't quite do it for me. Then it hit me...The Last Starfighter! It was one of my favorite movies as a kid and continues to be one of my favorite DVDs. I pop it in once every 4 or 5 months it seems.
I put it in a took a bunch of screen captures of the game to get a feel for it, and then I scoured the web looking for art. I found a few things that had already been been created, but nothing that had the level of detail I was looking for (although the type was great and saved me some time). I ended up finding a lo-res copy of the logo from the web and then I recreated it in Illustrator. I then tried to mimic (as best I can with a UAII) the side art stripes on the prop game from the movie. When it was all done I felt pretty good about the final results.
Then I started thinking about how a lot of people won't know the movie or reference, so I wanted to add something on there about MAME and "arcade". So I started working on the marquee, and I decided to veer from the theme just a bit. Here's what I came up with:
I think I'm going to stick with that for sure, but here's where I need some opinions. I was going to leave the cabinet with just "Starfighter" like this:
... but then I wondered if I should match the marquee with the same words like this:
I made the subtitle gray to make it fade into the background a little (a little too much in the jpg, but in Illustrator it pops a bit more). I'm still not sure though.
So what do you think? I'd like to get a different prospective other than my own. Do I stick with the more authentic Starfigher look on the sides, or do I do my "Mame Arcade" version?
Your opinions are welcome.
Thanks,
RubberP