This weekend I decided to model some old arcade cabinets after my xbox crashed and I lost a bunch of unsaved progress in my re-play through of Bully: Scholarship Edition. I didn’t feel like redoing all the missions I had just completed so I thought I’d get to work on some models for Jon’s project. I need to make environments as well as weapons, so that means I need lots of little items to fill these environments (think furniture, crates, common everyday items).

I have recently had an urge to go spend a few hours at an arcade. A few days ago I watched a short documentary about arcade-fighter tournaments (which don’t really happen on arcade cabinets anymore), and one on the evolution of the first person shooter (which is more about PC gaming than it is arcades, but it still reminded me of tons of games I used to love as a kid and haven’t seen in years) while I was working. I’ve also been talking about pinball table restoration with my dad a lot since we brought the family table out of storage, so all these things lead to modeling the above cabinets.

Originally I had planned to just model the cabinets and leave the screens blank (as if they were unplugged), but then I decided to have some fun and make up some games that never existed (but if they did, I’d want to play them). I tried to keep with the tradition of retro arcade games and put far more impressive visuals on the cabinet than actually appear within the game.

The machine on the left takes it’s inspiration from one of my favourite games to play at the 7-11 when I was a kid: Golden Axe. Originally I planned to call it Swordious the Savage Slayer, after my very short lived World of Warcraft character – Swordious. Then my hatred for all things WOW prevented me from doing so. The game on the right is my own original concept for a space shooter called Pew³ (or Pew Pew Pew: Space Shooter Awesome!). I would pump quarters into both these machines based on name and cabinet graphics alone.

I did my best to make the text and images on the displays look like shitty 8-bit graphics, but I don’t think it shows up well. You can click the images if you want to see a slightly bigger version. I doubt these cabinets will actually get used for Jon’s project, but I had a lot of fun making them and imagining what they would actually be like (in terms of game play, story, etc.). I may still use the cabinet model, but I’ll strip it right down probably. It all depends on what environments they decide to use really.

I also plan to make a cabinet for Bully. I want to write an entry about why I love that game, and I thought it would be cool to make an image of an arcade version to go along with it. First I have to finish it again. last time I played it was in 2006! I almost couldn’t remember the hot art teacher’s name…