MTG: Electric Seaweed | Arcade Cabinet (2024)
Inside my other lane
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Occasionally, my Magic art directors have noticed work I do outside of illustration and have tried to find ways to have me work in those genres within Magic. It stands to reason that if I work in landscape or traditional still life outside of Magic, I might enjoy landscape or food still life painting within the game. Looking back at the past ten years of my work in Magic (since I started doing more of this other work), you can kind of see that influence in my Magic work.
Working on sets like Final Fantasy were great excuses to tap my love of the video game imagery in illustration. But I did not expect my work on my Hearts for Hardware series to ever lend itself to my illustration work.
In the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle set, I worked on a couple of character pieces but then was also given two very different assignments that appealed to this other side. The first was a callback to the 8-bit NES game, similar to my treatment of the Mountain card in the Final Fantasy set—translating 256x224 resolution pixel graphics into a full illustration.
I didn’t play the TMNT NES game when it released. I was towards the end of my NES gaming era, though. I greatly enjoyed the arcade brawlers released in this period, however. I did know the game by reputation though, and this particular underwater area of the game as a notorious controller-throwing, rage-inducing level.
In solidarity with those who struggled through years ago, I decided to play through this game in the weeks leading up to this set’s release. And while the game is indeed very difficult overall, owing more to the 2-continues per game limitation than anything, I confess I didn’t find this level all that difficult. It’s main problem is that you have to run through the game so many times due to the two continues, and this level is finnicky so it can set you back before you make your way back to your last furthest-reached area. I probably failed more times trying to get through the holes in the floor in Level 4 before the closing walls got me.
More surprising still was the assignment for Arcade Cabinet. In this, I was to show a made up arcade game the Turtles have sort of kit-bashed together in their hideout, cobbled together from things found in trash bins or on the sidewalk on the nights before trash days (this is NYC, after all). The details of the game were up to me, but being setup in their hideout meant it couldn’t look like in an arcade—so graffiti, pipes, and random bits of décor the turtles have put on the wall (NYC street signs, mostly).
This is far closer to my Hardware pieces while still being wildly outside of it. For starters, all my Hardware pieces are physical paintings, often more thickly painted than my painted illustration work. This was to be digital. My hardware paintings are done fully in earnest as fine art pieces, this was to be fun, irreverent and early 90s kitsch. As well, the game doesn’t exist. And it isn’t a “pure” game, either, but is salvaged, with makeshift parts. Actually, it was a pretty tall order, but I leaned into it.
A year or two prior, my wife had gifted me the hardcover book Artcade: The Book of Classic Arcade Game Artwork. I’ve also posted over the years about the video game marquees that adorn my studio walls. So in a way, this was more up my alley than I initially thought.
I got to thinking about this fictional game, and set about designing the fictional side art, 80s logo, and title screen, which I rendered using the SEGA Genesis palette at true-to-era 320x224 pixels, because I am exactly that nerdy. The cabinet is a repurposed William’s Defender cabinet—certainly quite a lot of old cabinets were repurposed for conversion kits similarly.
So while this whole illustration is far more digital-looking than most of my digital work, there were still a lot of purely hand-done aspects to it. I’d love to show you the source files to the cabinet artwork, but alas, I am unable. I’d also like to play this game, which obviously takes inspiration from Data East’s Burgertime, and all the NYC rats we saw hauling pizza up stairs in the subway system, when we lived there.
Because these area Universes Beyond illustrations, I am unable to show in-progress or preparatory works for these images.
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