4K Vertical Overlay Community Contributions

Gradius 2/Venture Vulcan 4K Vertical Overlays

Coin door version overlays available now on the google drive:

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Butasan/Pigs & Bombers 4K Vertical Overlay

One more overlay for this weekend. This one falls into the hidden gem category and is one of Jaleco’s better titles. This is another game that I don’t believe had a NA release, so I used the flyers to create this artwork:

I posted the custom marquee a while back and here is the accompanying bezel:

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Nice job! I’ve never even heard of this game.

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Same here, saw it on some random retrogaming stream and found out it’s a cult classic :man_shrugging:

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Oops! thanks for telling me @ArsInvictus :grin:

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Here’s a marquee for Xexex:

Will be getting around to an overlay for this soon, I hope :slight_smile:

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More Xexex stuff. A bezel based on a design motif from the original Japanese arcade topper and an instruction strip I cleaned up and translated from the Japanese:

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Killer original art on those shooters… a lot of those in that time period should have had artwork as they were great games, but they were getting cheap on the cabinets by then. Looking at your marquees for these games, I can really imagine that this is something like the art would have looked like for these cabinets.

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Thank you @Drybonz! I’m glad the effort I put into these is appreciated. I typically spend hours scouring the internet looking for the best quality sources for the original artwork, learning about the game, and trying to come up with something that is as respectful and authentic to the original game and original artists as possible. I enjoy the whole process as it’s creative and I feel it’s a kind of archeology, but I’m glad that folks out there enjoy the outcome too!

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You have a good eye for making these look like they could be the original art.

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4K Vertical Overlay for Xexex

This has got to be the brightest most colorful palette I’ve ever seen in a game. I think it actually makes it harder to play.

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That game’s so bright I gotta wear shades. :sunglasses:

I’ll show myself out…

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Here’s a marquee for Darius Gaiden:

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More Darius Gaiden materials. The instruction strip was created from elements of the japanese and english instruction cards while the bezel was based off the box art for the Interplay published PC version of the game:

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Darius Gaiden 4k Vertical Overlay

Will we ever have a new game franchise built around flying, intergalactic, cybernetic fish? I’m guessing not :frowning:

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I miss the weirdness of the 80’s. There was a pinball table called Baracorra, the theme of which was a girl with fish coming out of her head. No excuses were needed… no storyline… just an idea. :slight_smile:

https://pinside.com/pinball/machine/barracora

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Yeah the 80’s (and 70’s) had some crazy concepts. In the video game world so much of it seemed to come from the collision of Japanese and western cultures and artistic traditions. I think we are moving to more of a monoculture now. One thing that jumps out at me when I’m looking at the Japanese game art from the 80’s through the mid 90’s, the earlier art had a very different sense of color in their designs. But in the later years the Japanese designs started to look more similar to the western. I’m still fairly flummoxed sometimes when I look at the older color palettes. They combined things that I wouldn’t think should work, but they do. I try to keep that in mind when I’m producing this stuff.

Also, The artist it lists for that table, Doug Watson, worked on some other seminal title artwork like Attack From Mars. As I’ve learned more about the video game art I’ve been amazed that such a relatively small number of artists produced a huge proportion of the art back then.

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Mikie 4K Vertical Overlay

I recently saw @Orionsangel do an overlay for this one in his thread and realized it is long overdue for a vertical overlay too:

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Awesome job! Yeah, I don’t think many have talked about that game before. It was time for a bezel.

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Yeah I found out about from the What Would Jeff Kinder Do and Vintage Arcade Gal’s youtube channels. Both really good channels for arcade cabinet restoration and history.

1 Like