Artwork

Mr. Do is quite a popular, classic game. Play it once and you will be hooked. For that reason, it appears that any original versions of this game are hard to come by. The popularity of the game drove it to have one of the most popular and successful conversion kits ever made and as a result, most of the Mr. Do games you come across and conversions. I have seen a ton of them in the cabinets with the presidential wood siding venire. They have everything, the marquee, the control panel artwork, but they have nothing on the sides, which, for a guy who loves sideart is really disappointing.

Here’s a little other bit about the game’s history. Apparently even what I thought was the original cabinet from Universal, isn’t even true. If this is even true (skeptical) the original Mr. Do had a black joystick, and came from Japan. Most of the common ones were made by Universal in a very similar looking cabinet, but were actually conversions from another game called Lady Bug, and had an orange joystick. Therefore the true-true original Mr. Do’s out there are even that much more scarce. Check out photos below of the most familiar Mr. Do cabinet.

Which brings me to the “White Sideart” version. I found out about this version / artwork in October of 2006. A friend of mine forwarded me an auction on ebay for a Mr. Do with some strange artwork on the side that I had never seen before. I didn’t think much of it, kept an eye on it, but it was about in Mass., so that would be quite a distance for this game.

Now, like I mentioned above, there were some conversion kits out there, possibly for both versions of the game, the white sideart and the regular version that most commonly had the green marquee. Some of the white conversion kits were more thoroughly applied than others, because the kit came with sideart but finding a machine with it applied is difficult. The artwork was printed on white with Mr. Do and his enemies in a maze like pattern with the cakes and fruits from the game. It is pretty different looking but I do like sideart, and in a way, I like this just as much as the original because the original was void of any real artwork other than the red lines on the side of the cabinet.

These are the photos that I have found so far of this cabinet. They are a little more plentiful in photos then they are in finding actual owners. Right now I know of none.

Please Contact Me With Information

If you own, or know anyone who owns one of these, or just know some more of the history of this particular version, I would love to know more. I would look to buy, but that is not the main idea. Most people who have rare, or hard to find games aren’t looking to just sell.

What I am looking for, is someone who would be willing to take some hi-res photos of the different pieces of artwork so that I can trace them in Illustrator and reproduce them for my own machine, and only my own machine.

If you can help me out, shoot me an email, I would really appreciate it. Any information at all would do.

However, as of this writing in February of 2007, I haven’t found a site that has the art, or anyone who is talking this much about this one piece of artwork. If you know that to not be true, please, I would be happy for you to show me any other sites, drop me a line.

I can remember playing Pengo in the mid 80’s on an early IBM computer. This computer was a huge part of my childhood, friend’s of my parents owned it and their son was a burgeoning computer nerd. He always had different games loaded on it, including some popular, to be, arcade classic’s like Sega’s Pengo. I could play Pengo for hours, so until I got it in late summer of 2006, I had never actually played Pengo as an upright machine.

I would like to build up my library of exclusively owned vector artwork of games I like, artwork I like, and rarity. I felt like the Pengo sideart fell into all of those categories, and there is some demand out there for Pengo reproduction artwork in case I want to go through the process of printing.

Even with the past successes of Pac-man and Ms. Pac-man, most sites will tell you that the downturn of the arcade industry in the early 80’s prevented Jr. Pac-man from obtaining worldwide success. As such, the production of dedicated machines were halted and a number of conversion kits were made available instead. One kit was for a Pac-man conversion, and one was for a Super Pac-man conversion.

Below is the back of one of the flyer’s from the game. You can find this at Arcadeflyers.com.

You can see that it lists what you get in your conversion, a Jr. Pac-man Logic Board, Header Glass, Monitor Overlay Glass, Control Panel Artwork Overlay, and Front Cabinet Artwork Overlay (kickplate). No mention of full size sideart.

Since most Jr. Pac-man’s were conversions it is quite a challenge to find the original game that was produced in the unique Mappy cabinet. I have heard rumors that only 500 total were ever produced. (Heck, Mappy is a hard enough game to come by, and those go for decent prices as well.)

The conversion kits didn’t come with a set of the original sticker Jr. Pac-man sideart, only the “text” sticker. There were two different versions of this text sticker (both with rounded edges). One that said “Jr. Pac-man” with Jr. riding his bike which was meant for a Pac-man conversion, and one that just had the “Jr. Pac-man” text in a curve that was meant for Super-Pac-man conversions. The curved text Jr. Pac-man sticker would fit at the space at the top of the cabinet just above Super Pac-man’s head.

So with potentially only 500 dedicated style Jr. Pac-man’s ever sold, and counting the possible number of those destroyed or converted or whatever else, that makes the original sideart sticker on a Mappy cabinet pretty hard to come by. Hell, I wouldn’t have even known it existed if I hadn’t seen a photo of this Jr. Pac-man machine on the KLOV site (Image to the right). I would have thought that there was only the conversion artwork available.

Why I like the artwork for Jr. Pac-man

The Jr. Pac-man sideart has been a piece of artwork that I have known about for awhile, but in late 2006 through early 2007 I developed a true fascination for it. The reason I am facinated with the artwork is that I love the Pac-man character / history, I love the gameplay for this particular game and the tweaks they did to make it a new twist, and the fact that the Jr. Pac-man is really rare to find in it’s entirety with little damage (Most commonly in rips to the sideart) also makes it desirable.

Check out the image below. What I really loved about the original sideart on any games is that it was a composition with the
shape of the cabinet, and some of the coolest artwork was stenciled on the cabinets. (Now, in this case, Jr. Pac-man is a little different because the original sideart is a sticker that was applied to a Mappy cabinet, sometimes right over top of the Mappy sideart sticker. When there are rips in the sideart, you can see the original Mappy sticker underneath.)

Early on I got a large format digital .jpg image of the Jr. Pac-man “text” sticker meant for a Pac-man conversion. Since it held little value to me I checked one of the larger websites for arcade art, Localarcade, and they didn’t have a source to trace this artwork yet. So I sent the guy this Jr. Pac-man text image and have been working with him to produce a nice piece of digital vector art.

Looking for an original Jr. Pac-man

As of late 2006 I know of two original Jr. Pac-man’s that are within a reasonable driving distance of me. One I have seen in person, and another one I have only seen in photos, but both have the sides painted over in black. This makes my drive that much stronger, being frustrated that there are two Jr. Pac-man’s in Mappy cabinets that are so close to me, but either have no sideart, or it is painted over and if potentially uncovered would have tears anyway.

I went back and forth on what to do. The painting on these two Jr. Pac-man machines was all over the game, even the top sides of the marquee header. I know what a pain paint can be to remove from a machine from experience. And even then, there are no guarantees on how it would look. So, I decided that I would start to look for images of the Jr. Pac-man sideart that I could trace and potentially have to reproduce if I ever figured I wanted either one of these two, or if I wanted to buy a Mappy and convert it.

I had spent a lot of time searching online for photos of the cabinet sides, but with little luck. Then in early 2007 I found a website that had photos of the game with sideart that were a little bit bigger in resolution than the photo on KLOV. Nonetheless, both of these sets of images were still too small to even think about reproducing the artwork in vector format by tracing. (On the left is one of the images I found.) With such little luck I just figured there was no way I was going to find enough instances of the Jr. Pac-man machines and collectors with them to get some photos to work from.

But then, I found a listing on GGDB of a collector who had a really nice looking Jr. Pac-man, and a photo of it in a line of other arcade machines showing that it had great sideart. Finally! Someone I could contact for help. (It wasn’t until later that I figured out later he was the same individual who had submitted the first photo I saw on Klov. I used the network of collectors I have been building to get an email address, because at the time I didn’t know his profiles on the Arcade forum websites, andstarted a line of communication to get the Jr. Pac-man artwork reproduced.

Jr. Pac-man with Sideart Registry

Names listed with the confirmed timeframes of when they last owned a Bally Jr. Pac-man. If there were as many as 500 arcade machines produced originally, I would doubt that there are any where near that number of them left.

Note: These are only machines with Jr. Pac-man sideart in tact in some condition. I haven’t added to this list the aforementioned two versions I know that are painted solid black on the sides. This also helps rule out collectors who have converted Mappy cabinets later on because the sideart wasn’t produced separately, (Neither I nor anyone I know has ever seen a set) so more than likely no one had a set to apply over top of a conversion. If they did, they’d be an idiot to not scan and reproduce it first, or keep it alone for the value.

* = No Sideart on this game.

Final Note

As of this writing in early 2007, I haven’t found a site that has the Jr. Pac-man sideart, or anyone who is talking this much about this one particular piece of artwork. If you know something to the contrary, I would be happy for you to show me any other sites with exclusive information or insight into the game. Please use this email to drop me a line.

I have met one owner of an Agent X arcade game, although I didn’t know anything about it when I met him, nor did I even see the game during my visit. It wasn’t until successive conversions later that I found out about Agent X’s rarity.

This is what Joe had to say about Agent X and what he had to go through to get his;

“On the Cloak & Dagger, it gets a little collector/geeky/anal. When Atari originally developed the game, the name was Agent X. Then Hollywood made the movie Cloak & Dagger and asked Atari to make a game for it. Agent X was already version of the game. It was released for general purchase in kit only form, for converting other games, specifically Williams games (Stargate, Defender, Robotron, Joust). Rumor has it that only 20 dedicated units were ever made and these were only made for testing purposes, they were never meant for public release. Of those 20, 7 were Agent X, and the other 13 were Cloak & Dagger. So game play wise, Agent X and Cloak & Dagger are exactly the same, only difference is the title screen.”

“Cabinet wise, conversion units are cheap and relatively easy to find. They sell on ebay for less than $400. Dedicated units are close to impossible, as there were only 20 or so made, and the ones out there are typically in collectors hands that don’t want to sell them. The last one I heard selling was a Cloak & Dagger which sold for $3,000. An Agent X is even more rare. At one point someone offered me $10,000 for my Agent X. I’m sure that’s no longer a valid offer as that person has since got a dedicated Cloak & Dagger. But it was a nice offer to get. Certainly one of the most valuable in my collection.”

“Probably way more information than you wanted, but it’s one of my prize games, so I like talking about it! It was a pretty big search to find and get.”

So basically my interpretation of this information is that of the few Agent X’s that were produced, most of them are or at one time were owned by Atari employees. Now they made have made their hands into serious collectors who know their value, similar to Joe, but the only way you might get one is to start the way he did and track down some old Atari employees.

Why repoduce artwork for Agent X?

Well, for two main reasons. I like the two people I have met, so it is a good opportunity to show them some good will in networking. Also, because Agent X is so rare, hopefully it will mean I am one of the few people who have a copy of vector artwork for the Agent X kickplate, sideart, marquee, speaker overlays, control panel, or whatever else I decided to vectorize and prepare for reproduction.

I didn’t know too much about the game, other than it was trivia based game with questions and answers. Reading klov, it says that the game had over 500 unique answers, which really isn’t a ton. Midway thought this was going to be the next big type of game, but it flopped immediately, and only 400 were ever made.

Not a type of game that appealed to me, Pac-man based or not, I didn’t figure that I would be doing artwork for this game. But Richard Ford asked me if I could redo the control panel for him, I believe he has two of the few that still remain. The second one needs the parts, and hence the artwork.