Pengo Overlays – Coming up on a year

Some time back I finished preparing the Pengo CPO artwork for offset printing, vectorizing my original cpanel and then performing the color separations. I asked Rich at This Old Game if he was interested to print these, because I thought we might be able to sell a decent quantity over time. He said yes and we were on our way.

Now, knowing how long some of these projects have taken in the past I was only going to start talking about the overlays once they were ready for sale. There is a lot of work involved with taking orders, giving people updates, people selling machines, reputations and all of that stuff that I thought the best strategy would just to sit tight until they were ready for sale. Rich ended up adding the Pengo CPOs to his ‘Coming Soon’ items when he rebooted his website a few months back, so slowly but surely people have found out that these are coming.

Where we started

I contacted Rich around the third week of June 2008 and inquired about his level of interest. After he said yes, I got on the horn on the 23rd and asked Dan P. out in California, who bought an NOS Pengo numeral style CPO from Brian in Milwaukee if he would lend to Rich for an indefinite amount of time for color matching purposes. I had taken down my best estimate of color matches for this Pengo overlay with a Pantone Process book and sent them along to Rich.

The overlay arrived in Oregon on the 27th and Rich confirmed that the colors I had chosen were spot on, maybe one or two needing small adjustments.

The Pengo Eskimos Overlay version is the most common, it came with the arcade machines from the factory so that was the piece we decided to reproduce. The Eskimo heads had an even red halftone pattern that I manually recreated. On the 30th Rich asked to confirm this and I sent along a full scan of the Pengo overlay artwork including the detail on the Eskimo faces.

A few weeks went by, and then I got the first screened color samples in the mail on August 6th. Even though Rich had an overlay, we wanted to make sure colors were consistent across both versions. All of the colors were the same, but if memory served me I told Rich the purple was a touch bright and he made some adjustments on his end accordingly.

On August 26th Rich wanted to confirm where all the buttons and joysticks would sit on the overlay. I did a drawing of all of the measurements for the overlay hole placement as well as the joystick and sent that along to him.

A few weeks later we had our first test film, on September 7th. This was pretty exciting to see. The artwork I had worked on painstakingly starting to come to life. Rich sent me some digital photos to make sure the screens looked right. I noticed a couple of missing pieces, some eyebrows, a missing toe, some ice block lines (very tiny detail) – and I noted that information to him.

On September 15th he did a second film, and that one was spot on. Here is a photo of one of those films for the ‘blue’ color sep.

Moving forward with the Pengo overlays

As we get closer for these overlays to be ready for sale, hopefully in about a month plus I will try to show some more of the progress photos of the overlays and talk a little bit about each step in the long process. Right now all that remaining is punching the button holes and these should be ready to roll.

If you are interested in getting an overlay, leave a comment. I have a Word file of people that had expressed interest in the past, but if you think you are going to buy one let us know. I might have missed you. There has been some talk about the sideart in the future, but if the sales tank on the CPOs, then there probably isn’t a reason to do the sideart. So, make sure to buy an overlay if you would like to see the sideart done.

Oh, and huge thanks to Dan P. for being extremely patient while we use his Pengo artwork to make these overlays the best possible.

You're reading Pengo control panel overlay reproductions are coming. is a post from: Jeff Rothe, originally posted on Rotheblog - An Arcade Game Blog. If you've enjoyed this post, be sure to follow Jeff on Twitter, Facebook, and Google +.

Find the distances for your arcade buttons

As I continue to work towards getting the Pengo control panel artwork reproduced there was one major decision I made. Seeing as I only have one Pengo control panel and I know that some of these reproduction pieces can take a long time (See Agent X artwork or most recently, the Zaxxon overlays) I wasn’t really keen on sending off my panel for someone to have for 6-12 months plus if I could help it.

But if you are going to accurately reproduce a piece of art, and your printer doesn’t own every arcade game ever made, they will need some piece to reference dimensions, colors, and other items. If you have extra items to lend, or in the best case scenario you have an NOS piece of artwork this whole post is irrelevant. I have neither so helping the printer properly position the button holes for die cutting is of the utmost importance.

Example control panel dimensions you’ll need

These suggestions will vary with every control panel. Each panel has different buttons configurations, bolt holes and other user controls. The general idea is you have to indicate to your printer where to put the holes. Usually you’ll want to measure from two dimensions on the panel to the button hole to give some idea of accurate placement. You’ll also want generally measure the different distances between the button / other holes in relation to one another. In regards to the Pengo, here is an idea of what I measured;

• Player 1 Button – Distance from left and top
• Player 2 Button – Distance from right and top
• Joystick Hole – Distance from top, (Offset in Illustration due to artwork) left, and right
• Bolt Holes – Distance from joystick hole top, left, right and bottom

You can measure this to death, or you can just provide some general guidelines. In the end, there will be plenty of testing to make sure alignment is correct on the overlay before the holes are actually die cut.

If you are submitting a piece of artwork to me, to avoide confusion do a rough drawing or use a graphics program. Here is a detail shot of some of the Pengo joystick measurements. This is what I would like to see;

If you can’t manage this, draw it out on paper in the shape of the control panel with the dimensions, take a digital photo or scan it, and email it to me.

Granted, if everything is correct in the file, you can measure the original arcade artwork scan in Photoshop to get distances on all of these button placements. This really serves as a double measure to make sure that everything is correct.

Questions?

In the end, the more dimensions the better, you just want the best product. Hopefully what you get will directly reflect what you put in.

You're reading Reproducing Control Panel Artwork – Control Placement is a post from: Jeff Rothe, originally posted on Rotheblog - An Arcade Game Blog. If you've enjoyed this post, be sure to follow Jeff on Twitter, Facebook, and Google +.

Everyone has seen these two cabinet photos off of the Sega flyers. The first image is from the illustrated flyer with the tagline – “Player appeal makes Pengo the game for everyone”, and the second image is taken from a lineup of Sega games with the title “You can bank on Sega’s new lineup”. It was the image from the ‘Appeal’ flyer that has caught my interest in the past because this is a rare Pengo bezel that I have never seen anywhere else, more than likely a prototype that never made it out of on location testing. However, the alternate version of the Pengo sideart is a primarily darker blue base kind of like this bezel, so maybe it is floating around out there. Anyway, on with the comparison

Set 1 of Pengo artwork

This is the set of Pengo art that I thinks goes together as ‘Set 1′. Just to point out a couple of the main indicators…

Look at the eyes. In this version Pengo’s eyeballs are blue with the Pac-man style cutout to give a illustrator’s version of an eyeball reflection. The blue itself is usually not any larger than 1/3 of the space for the whole eyeball and it never touches the sides. The surrounding areas are white, and the general expression is all the same, sometimes including eyebrows that are just curved lines.

Plus, the other really telling artistic detail is the choice of rendering on the purple bow. In the Standing marquee, the Numerals overlay and the traditional the bow is bulbous, and if there are any ‘knot’ lines, they curve with the circumference of the middle knot and are on the knot.

A smaller detail that you will notice is the rendering of the ice cubes. In the ice cube in the numerals overlay and the standing Pengo marquee, you will notice that they are thick blue lines, broken in place to add interest, and thick highlights to indicate the ice’s glossy surface.

Since the bezel that everyone knows uses the exact same artwork as the Pengo sideart, just re-apportioned, I am putting the bezel in this group.

Set 2 of Pengo artwork

Using the same criteria, here is the second set of Pengo artwork that goes together.

Look again at the eyes. The eyes are still blue but there is no highlight, the blue always takes up about half of the eyeball, and the blue always touches the sides. If Pengo has eyebrows in this version, they are oval like with a little splash of red in the middle (a hollow oval you could say)This is consistent across the alternate Pengo sideart, the original Eskimos overlay as well as the pushing ice block marquee. Although Pengo is pushing ice into the Sno-Bees on the numerals version of the overlay, you will notice in all of these pieces of artwork Pengo is pushing ice into the Sno-bees, and most of the time it is from an angled point of view.

Onto the lines in Pengo’s purple bow. If you take a look, there are always knot lines that are sometimes fragmented, but they are always in the bow portions, not on the knot. The artist sometimes used the negative space of the wrinkles to imply the shape of the knot, instead of always keeping it as a rounded rectangle sort of shape like we saw in the other artwork.

The final piece is the illustration of the ice blocks, and I found this to be the most interesting. The artist of this set of artwork chose to imply the block edges with two lines right next to each other. This is a more accurate portrayal from an illustrator’s POV because it implies that there is a thicker radius on the edge of the ice cube, which there realistically would be. The ice highlights are on the edges of the blocks in the Eskimo cpo and the alternate sideart, not on the face of the cube like there are in the first set. However, I do find it a little strange that the artist still renders the blocks in a harder edge fashion than the other Pengo artwork set.

Based on the fact that we have a tiny image of the alternate bezel that is a dark blue, I will put the second version of the Pengo bezel into this category.

Who can notice some other artwork differences?

I am sure there are other differences that you might be able to notice when comparing the ice, the mountains, or the Sno-bees, but I wouldn’t think it would be as obvious as the differences in rendering our title character Pengo. You would think it would be easy to separate the two sets of artwork by how the ‘Pengo’ logo text was rendered, but even that isn’t consistent with the artwork. Both versions of the Pengo marquee, the numerals version of the control panel overlay, as well as the predominant sideart all have the gradient logo version, red to blue. The original Eskimos cpo has a flat light blue fill. Very strange.

I emailed Dan Hower at ArcadeFlyers. We’ve been in touch before, and he’s been a great help for artwork. I am going to try and buy one of the Pengo flyers that has the alternate bezel to see if I can see even just a little more detail than the 72 DPI scan that is on the website. But either way, this is how I think the breakdown of the Pengo artwork should go. It may have been distributed differently, but having an Illustration degree, I know a little something about artist style. It is very hard to just fake a different style, so I really think that maybe one illustrator was an understudy of the other, or maybe they worked hand in hand because the drawing are so similar. But still, some small differences if you look close enough.

You're reading Differences in Pengo cabinet artwork is a post from: Jeff Rothe, originally posted on Rotheblog - An Arcade Game Blog. If you've enjoyed this post, be sure to follow Jeff on Twitter, Facebook, and Google +.

Here’s a composite image of all of the separations. I don’t know how many spot colors of blue will actually be used, more than likely at least three and possible one combination of the two colors can achieve the background grey / blue color behind the ice mountains. I also left the halftone dot gradient as it’s own separation on the Pengo bezel so that later on that halftone can be matched in shades of grey for the film, which may or may not be part of the same blue film for the jagged ice edges at the bottom of the bezel artwork.

The Pengo bezel artwork is repro ready

This Pengo artwork that goes around the monitor isn’t my favorite – it feels a lot like an after thought, like an adjustment of the sideart artwork to fit around the monitor. But I think that the demand to reproduce these bezels is just about as high as the sideart and both of those come a close second to the Pengo control panel overlays.

All that is left is for someone to fund a run of Pengo bezels. If and when someone steps up with some money to get the cpo’s get reproduced I will gauge the interest from that run to see if it still makes sense to a run of Pengo cardboard bezels. If that is the case, I can go back to the original financier to see if they are interested in putting up money for the bezels as well.

It may make more economic sense for collectors to have an inkjet printed piece applied to a cardboard cutout, but I hope it doesn’t come to that.

You're reading Pengo Bezel Color Separations is a post from: Jeff Rothe, originally posted on Rotheblog - An Arcade Game Blog. If you've enjoyed this post, be sure to follow Jeff on Twitter, Facebook, and Google +.

Here are the images of the myriad of different colors – Dark Blue, Light Blue, Red, Purple, and Yellow. Obviously as we have talked in the past, the purple may just be combination of the red and the blue, that will have to be determined in the screening process. I didn’t have a standard bleed amount, but some of the measurements were as small as .005 of an inch. Pretty small, I don’t know whether this will actually make a difference in consideration of registration, lots of fine detail.

Let’s get the Pengo control panel overlays reproduced

For me, this piece of Pengo artwork is absolutely, completely finished. I knew how much work was involved in doing the separations which stalled me for awhile. But now all that is left is to have the overlays printed.

I have had a couple of parties that are interested in funding the project, so I need to get back in touch with them to see if they’re still interested. But I know that once I drop the hammer on printing the Pengo control panel reproductions, I want it to be printed as quickly as realistically possible so we don’t have to keep anyone interested waiting.

Update – August 14, 2008
The people that initially expressed interest to put up the money to have the Pengo control panel overlays reproduced have fallen through. If there is anyone that wants to see the artwork that I have prepared printed and reproduced, get in touch with me if you are willing to put up the money for a small run of Pengo CPOs.