Arcade Artwork
White Mr. Do! with Sideart for Sale!
Late last week, an arcade collecting contact pointed out to me that another collector had a white Mr. Do! with the sideart, the one I have conveted for over a year now, was up for sale. Not to mention, this Do! was cheap cheap. Only $200. Check out the photos.
I couldn’t believe how great of condition the classic game is in. It’s like this white Mr. Do! was different than the others ones, because the artwork on the side had little to no flaking.
I thought briefly that this Mr. Do! machine was the one that Mark Deroller once owned. It had some ruboff on the side artwork of the machine, where you would place your left hand when playing the game. I also knew how far about Mark was in MA area to the current owner, and the current owner had posted total mileage each year he traveled to add to his arcade game collection. But, then I noticed the Mr. Do! control panel was different between the two different white machines. So, this makes it official that I have now seen three “white” Mr. Do!’s with sideart, possibly all made by Gleeb.
Only catch, the coin-op collector who owns it is all the way across the United States. I started to check into UShip, which is pretty cool, but it didn’t appear that even at such a low price I would be able to get the Mr. Do.
I told my fellow collector who turned me onto the Do! that we had to do something about it. He is within two hours of the game, and I have emailed the owner in the past about other arcade games. At the very least I was hoping he could make a deal to get out there and scan the Mr. Do! sideart.
But as of right now, he is considering the idea of just outright buying the Mr. Do! Watch here for updates…
Former CEO of Universal & Mr. Do!
Before we went to Michigan the first weekend of November, there was a post in the Klov forums about the versions of Mr. Do! I had mentioned one member had a couple of email exchanges with the former CEO of Universal, the company that made Mr. Do!
I emailed that member this week (shacklefurd), another coin-operated arcade game collector in Indiana. He emailed me back saying he wasn’t sure he still had the email address for the former Universal Games CEO, but he would check.
Here’s crossing my fingers. How cool would it be to find the company that made the Mr. Do! with white sideart and in finding that company discover that some of their former employees still have some of the white Mr. Do!’s in great condition. No sideart flaking at all. I can dream:)
If Shacklefurd doesn’t still have the email address for the former CEO, does anyone else have any leads? This Mr. Do! is becoming a little bit of my collecting grail. Shoot me an email if you can help me with any information about Gleeb or Universal.
Update – 4.15.09
Wow! Quite a bit of time has passed on this one. But, Jason S. was able to track down an email and more importantly a name for the former CEO of Universal and apparently he worked with other companies such as Exidy and Data East among others.
The original email he had bounced, and the new email I found got rejected, so I am going to keep digging. But I hope to finally find some answers to the white Mr. Do! character artwork license, possibly to a company on the east coast.
Circus Charlie sideart sold
I kept an eye on the peeled off Circus Charlie sideart that was on ebay this week, but I never did bid. Not a priority project for me right now, I couldn’t justify paying at least $18 for some beat up Circus Charlie artwork just to scan and vectorize it with no guarantee that I would reproduce it.
Buzzkill! won it, and I found a profile that matched his name on the Google Group forums, so I emailed him at buzzkill@comcast.net to see if he could help me out in scanning the (Konami) Circus Charlie sideart. That was the day after the auction ended on Wednesday of this week. I haven’t hear anything back yet, and I doubt I will.
If I am meant to get a scan of the Charlie sideart / sticker, I will. No big deal. But I don’t expect that something quite like peeled off artwork will come on ebay again anytime soon.
Pengo CPO Vector Update 1
I started working on vectorizing the Pengo control panel overlay (cpo) the day after I scanned it. In the first day I got the Pengo on the underside of the joystick (down motion) finished, as well as most of the Pengo eskimo player 1. On day two, I finished the eskimo player 1, and two players by mirroring the same artwork. Today, I also finished Pengo pushing an ice block into a sno bee on the upper left. But just Pengo, not the ice or the sno bee themselves.
Don’t know what tomorrow will bring for the Pengo artwork, hopefully continued progress.
There has been a ton of great debate and information on the Klov forums over the past couple of days on this Pengo project. We’ll have to pick between the two versions of most of the Pengo artwork, I will probably only do one set of reproduction artwork for this Sega game. We’ll have one marquee, one bezel, and one control panel reproduced. There is only one version of the Pengo sideart.
Pengo CPO Scanned
I decided last night that I would be a little more pro-active about the Pengo control panel overlay scan.
I took my control panel off of my Pengo, gave it a much needed scrub down with some citrus cleaner (hadn’t been done since I purchased the Pengo game about 15 months ago) and then I scanned the artwork in and pieced it back together.
This way, if I never hear back on my email about another Pengo CPO NOS scan, I have this one, and it has great detail at 600 DPI for the original scan, downsampled to 300 DPI for tracing.
I did notice looking through my found image files of Pengo control panels that there was another version. There was a second Pengo CPO that had a numeral “I” and “II” for the player buttons, and it had Pengo pushing the ice blocks into the sno bees. I actually like this Pengo overlay version better, but don’t know how rare it is. (I will try to post the file of this NOS Pengo overlay when I can.)
Does anyone know anything about this Pengo overlay, or have a example applied to their Sega Pengo game?
NOS Pengo CPO’s surface
A topic came up on KLOV last night via Brian Koening in WI. He got two NOS Pengo control panel overlays in a bulk buy from an operator. Now, there haven’t been an overwhelming amount of people, but it seems as though there are a lot of people who like Pengo, and their control panels have some sort of damage. There have been topics in the past about whether NOS even existed.
Brian is talking about having the CPO’s done on an inkjet and then laminated. Oy! You have got to be kidding me. He has a guy he has an allegience with and wants him to do the Pengo reproductions.
Brian doesn’t answer my emails, I must have done something wrong. But as luck would have it, I was revisiting some arcade collectors websites yesterday. I was on Appolo’s arcade website, and at one time they had a NOS Pengo CPO that they were talking about scanning and vectorizing.
So, I emailed Dawn asking if I could get a scan of the Pengo CPO.
We’ll have to see what she says. From reading their site, they have a ton of turnover in games and may not have it anymore. And she may not give me a scan, or even let me buy a scan or trade for it. Who knows, they don’t know me from anyone else.
I just hope we don’t have to have the first round of reproductions for any of the Pengo artwork be inkjet laminates.
Watch for updates here.
Circus Charlie Sideart on ebay
A friend brought this post on the klov forums to my attention. He knew that I had started to do some vector work on some Circus Charlie sideart. What the hell though, seriously! Why did this guy destroy multiple machines to scrap off old sideart?
This is original side art set off the video game Circus Charlie. It is fairly good condition. It was peeled off the cabinet and still has some adhesive backing.
The one side could probably still be scanned in and used as great reference. But I know that I am not paying much for this sideart, already the initial bid with shipping is a little high for my tastes. The Circus Charlie sideart project is a fun one, but not for a coin-op machine of my own. I’ll just have to watch it. If the sideart doesn’t sell, maybe the seller will come down in initial price.
