One of the most important things about your game is it’s appearance. The things that make up a game’s overall appearance are the marquee, side art, control panel, monitor glass, instruction stickers and other misc. art.
Most of the games people tend to collect are as much as 20 or more years old and have spent the good part of their lives in an arcade being hammered by young brutes bent on beating the machine into submission. It usually shows. Control panels get cracks, tears, burns and spills. Marquees get cracked, start flaking and fade. Side art gets gouged, scratched, removed, scuffed and even painted over. Monitor glasses get broken, scratched by vandels and fade. You know the story all too well.
Finding replacement art for your game can be an expensive if not impossible proposition. The companies that originally made these games are either out of business, or not interested in making new art available due to the lack of profit potential. If you’re lucky you may find New Old Stock pieces of artwork for your game for sale on the collecting newsgroups or on eBay. Most likely it’ll be very expensive. There needs to be an alternative. Enter the CAGA.
This is a collection of high quality digital images of various artwork in a format suitable for professional printing. You can download these images and take them to your friendly neighborhood printer on a disk. Many printers can now print on large, oversized, high quality inkjet printers that look great. They can print on adheasive backed material for sideart or material ment for backlighting for marquees. If you need to print a control panel overlay, look into having it reverse-screened onto lexan.
You can print them out on your personal printer at home with good results, too. I use an Epson Photo 1200 to print art. It will print on photo-quality paper up to 12.15” wide and as long as 32 feet! The quality is great and the printer is quite reasonably priced.
The archive will never be complete. There are thousands and thousands of games with artwork that needs to be archived. If you have a scan of a piece of artwork that is not currently in the archive, please contribute. If you are a graphic artist and have the skills to take a raw scan, merge the pieces together and clean it up, please conisder donating your time to the cause. You can contact me at the email address at the bottom of the page.
**WARNING** If you try to download every piece of art on this whole site at once, I will ban your IP address. Just take what you need. You don’t need it all.
