Dan Sinker visited the Galloping Ghost Arcade in Brookfield, Illinois and chronicled the arcade cabinet marquee art he found. They all look amazing:
After a while though, I became captivated not by the games themselves but by the incredible art on the cabinets and specifically the marquee, the sign set above the screen, tempting a kid from 1983 to spend their hard-earned quarters. The marquee back then had to do a lot of work, because the games themselves were all low resolution and blocky affairs. The marquee had to sell the idea of the game, the excitement around the concept and the story because the on-screen graphics alone weren’t going to do it. So you made sure that your marquees did the job, filling it with exquisite hand-lettered logos, art borrowed from the pages of fantasy novels, sci-fi, and comics, and vivid color palettes that would shine out into the dark arcade.
These vintage marquees, to me, are such a beautiful vernacular artform that perfectly capture the moment where our lives were transitioning from the physical to the digital.
Love to see Tapper in there too! I’d recommend going to the blog post to see the images in high resolution.
(via Kottke.org)