Scanning in Mr. Do! Bezel
Today I took a lot of time to scan in the bezel, from the rare “white” Mr. Do! arcade game, in 8 different pieces and stitch it together. It doesn’t look great, there is some discoloration and one spot is just fractions of an inch from lining up, but even with all that headache and the one missing chunk, I can still perfectly finish my vector artwork for the Mr. Do Bezel.
Photo of Mr. Do! Bezel I won on ebay
Before I left for vacation I heard back from Mark, and we emailed a couple of times.
First, he did indeed end up selling his Mr. Do about 5 years ago he said, which would have been about the time he was posting looking for that bezel in the Google Groups. He said that he sold it to a couple he thought, and was remembering for some reason that they may have resold it soon after that. He offered to look through his old email to see if he could find some contact information for them. So that is very exciting.
Also….I have heard in the past that if you wait long enough you will eventually see something come back up on ebay again if you missed it the first time. Well, there was no first time that I missed it, but the White Mr. Do Bezel came up for sale under a “miscellaneous” title on ebay a couple weeks ago. I was in contact with another guy who does Mame stuff and we were going to get it either way between the two of us. Well, I bid and no one else did, I got the stupid thing for a $1. Of course there was $12 shipping, but still pretty cheap for something I wanted that bad.
I had it waiting for me when I got back from vacation, the colors look really good. There are some scratches which you couldn’t see in the auction, and it does have a small chunk missing at the bottom and some cracks / melted spots, but I don’t care. I wanted it to have it, and I knew I could use it to complete the bezel tracing that I needed to do! Here is a photo of it.
Finished first piece of artwork for Mr. Do!
Finally getting a chance to post an image of the Wind Up Mr. Do character that I got to trace last week.
Weird looking guy, but hey, I like the game and it is the only real sideart I know of. Other characters are cooler looking, I may get to them next week.
Looking for RGVAC member “Alphamonster”
I “Ping’d” Eric – “Alphamonster” on the Google Group today, and hope that he has the time to get back to me. At one time, he had a white Mr. Do! and he seems to know his stuff when it comes to arcade games rarely posting on the group. Hopefully he finds my message and is nice enough to shoot me a line.
In another post, a guy by the name of “Keith in NJ” had asked “Eric” (Alphamonster) if he would take some photos of the white character Mr. Do! sideart for him, because he was looking to do the exact same thing I am, reproduce the artwork. I emailed Keith today to see if he ever got a response, or if he was ever able to find photos big enough to reproduce the artwork. We’ll see what he says.
Found an artist on the BYOAC forum today that has been collecting / tracing pieces of Mr. Do art for a project of his since 2005 named Keith Corcoran. I emailed him to see if he knew anything or could lead me in a certain direction on getting the artwork for this game.
Later in the day, Dan emailed me back and gave me some more history on his Mr. Do. He said that he sold it back in 98-99 to PA Gameroom Warehouse. I checked the site, and they have this particular Mr. Do! I couldn’t believe it. I don’t know if it is the same one he had or not, but it also isn’t cheap. You can check it out here, going for the affordable price of a used car at $1195.
Update August 28th, 2008
I never did hear back from Alphamonster way back last year, but I just happened to be looking on the ‘For Sale’ forums on klov and saw a profile of the same name of a collector out in Long Island New York (where I think Eric was located). I ended up emailing him, so hopefully this time I do hear back. Although, I think I sent mail to the same email address (“heman2rit@hotmail.com”) so maybe my luck will be the same.
