Zaxxon Control Panel Overlays

Any arcade reproduction artwork project can take a long time and these Zaxxon CPOs weren’t any different. First mentioned nearly two years ago, this piece of Zaxxon artwork was no different but the overlays are finally finished and up for sale.

The Overlay Artwork

There was a thread on RGVAC back in December of 2006 asking other collectors if anyone had already reproduced Zaxxon CPOs. Troy Akey noted that he planned on getting an estimate from a printer near his hometown of McHenry IL and would have an answer in 30 days.

30 days turned into a year, just about to the day. I don’t know if there wasn’t enough interest in him taking on the project, there were really only four people who expressed interest in buying an overlay, or if like the rest of us other things came up in his life. Troy had started threads on RGVAC in the past, trying to gauge interest in different reproduction projects like an Afterburner Cockpit Plexi Bezel, and a Turkey Shoot CPO. It looked as though the Afterburner artwork was ready to go, but as far as I know was never printed.

Moving ahead to December of 2007. Troy again renewed interest in taking on some reproduction project posting a list of arcade artwork on RGVAC. As far as I know Troy works a lot with Jeff Warden in turning up caches of games around the Chicago area and they have built up an extensive collection of arcade games and NOS artwork. I know Jeff has contacted me about doing a Juno First overlay and just take a look at the list of items Troy was looking at reproducing;

• Satan’s Hollow
• Pengo
• Zaxxon
• Discs of Tron (upright)
• Mad Planets
• Paperboy
• Rampart side art
• Rolling Thunder

Troy was nice enough to exclude Pengo from his list once he found out that both versions had already vectorized, the eskimos overlay and numerals overlay. (My guess is that he has the numerals NOS version as I still haven’t seen an NOS factory eskimos Pengo overlay turn up just yet.) Mad Planets CPOs were later reproduced by Quarter Arcade.com and sold out in early 2008.

The Zaxxon ball is rolling

There was a lot of votes for Zaxxon, and that was the project of choice. Troy went to Central Decal and started the process, making the first Zaxxon announcement on RGVAC in April of 2008 letting everyone know how much the overlays would be and the price.

Months went by, and updates were made on the arcade forums on klov about the status of the Zaxxon overlays. Phoenix Arcade uses Central Decal as well, I don’t know why Troy had so many problems, you would think this little piece of CPO artwork would have been a breeze. But from what he wrote it sounded as if they had problems thinking for themselves, looking at an original NOS piece of Zaxxon control panel artwork and faithfully reproducing it. Overall, it sounded like a major headache.

But in the end, all of Troy’s hard work paid off and he has some beautiful looking overlays. Check out a photo or two below.

Check out Troy’s Photobucket album for more Zaxxon overlay photos.

Zaxxon overlays available for purchase

They came in just this week, so if you are still interested in buying one you will want to email Troy at overlays@arcadeadventures.com.

I heard rumblings that the amount of orders that came in didn’t align with the quantities he had pictured to sell, and that he may not do another project. Hopefully he did some of the tactics I suggested in my ‘Getting committed buying collectors for your reproduction project‘ post. I am sure there are a ton of Zaxxon owners listed on VAPS that may have wanted an overlay but have been out of it for awhile that they haven’t even seen his postings. The supposed owners of Zaxxon are numerous, the list itself is over 80 collectors who own this game.

As of now, it looks as though he is moving down the list to the next most requested item and that next item up for reproduction are upright Discs of Tron overlays. Maybe they won’t come to be like the Afterburner and Turkey Shoot projects, but Troy is now an expert in costs and pitfalls of arcade repro artwork. Hopefully he can churn out a few more quality projects.

Best of luck. The comprehensive reproduction arcade artwork list has been updated with a link to this post and contact information so hopefully this will bring in a couple more interested parties.

Here are some similar arcade posts

• Pengo Control Panel Color Separations
• New Resource – List of Willis Control Panel Overlay Artwork with Photos
• Pengo control panel overlay reproductions are coming.
• Atari Football Sideart Reproductions
• What’s it worth? Sega Zaxxon sold in Cincinnati, OH

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