How did Atari apply side art to Arcade Cabinets?

https://arcadeblogger.com/2026/06/14/how-did-atari-apply-side-art-to-arcade-cabinets/

by msephton • 1 month ago

103 22 1 month ago

jdswain• 1 month ago

One thing that I don’t think the article mentions is how many times a screen could be used?

foodandart• 1 month ago

It really does depend on the thickness of the photo emulsion and the print ink. I've done silk screen prints where 20 prints were managed with little detail loss. The thing with the silk screens is that as a woven cloth, it's prone to slightly stretching with each pass of the ink, so the emulsion gets thin in spots rather quickly.

I would imagine that on the big industrial printers that are using a metal mesh screen and thicker emulsion, it's maybe closer to 50? Usually in a print shop doing a big run, there'll be four or five screens made for each print layer so when one gets worn, it's replaced in the printing rack. It really is an artform.

ivan888• 1 month ago

This seems very low. I have not worked in professional screenprinting environments, but all resources I have seen indicate potential for hundreds or thousands of high quality prints from a well prepared screen.

esafak• 1 month ago

Youtube is truly a treasure.

dylan6042• 1 month ago

It can be, when the video is worth while. The embedded video here isn't what I'd call worth while. Someone shot a lot of video but not video that shows the process in detail. There's equal footage of closeups of 80s mustaches as the process. They are impressive 'staches though

videotopia• 1 month ago

Try watching from 50 seconds in. It shows the process in as much detail as one would need I think.

SoftTalker2• 1 month ago

I saw the headline and immediately thought "silk screen"

We learned how to do it in 8th grade in shop class. The end result was a T-shirt or other item that we printed from the screens we made. We cut our screens manually with an Xacto knife, but also learned about photo emulsion screens.

Supernaut• 1 month ago

What you’re seeing there, isn’t a giant sticker being applied.

I thought it worth mentioning that stickers were in the mix too. In the town I grew up in, there was a printing company that made them for Atari. I recall being brought to a "local industry expo" event as a kid, and I have a vivid memory of seeing heavy-duty vinyl (?) stickers for "Pole Position" at this company's stand. They would have been designed to be applied to the marquees and control panels of the upright cabinet.

Animats2• 1 month ago

Again, volume. The Atari cabinet shown was a low-volume product. Pole Position was a high-volume product.

Animats2• 1 month ago

Right. That's a medium-volume production process.

Some years ago, I had a boxed software product made. I went to the box factory with a disk with the imagery, and sat down with the woman who made up the printing plates. She aligned the imagery to a box template, and I signed off approval. Connected to her Mac was a lithography plate maker the size of a car. That made the masters by photolithography.

I was invited to see the press. After putting on earplugs, we went into the press room. The press was a sheet-fed press about a hundred feet long, turning out about one large sheet per second. It was capable of something like fourteen layers, so it could do glossy and flat areas, intense saturated colors, shiny seals, and other special effects. Most of the time it ran with four to seven colors. That day it was turning out art prints, of the sort that appear in hotel rooms. When the box business was slow, they printed artworks.

Press setup and alignment was time-consuming. Cost about $4000 for the first box, $0.25 for the second and later boxes. The big advancement in presses in this century is that the alignment and color ink distribution settings are now automated, so there's a lot less trial and error at the beginning of each run. Older presses have a huge number of knobs and cranks.

That's the next step up in volume from silk-screening.

mrandish• 1 month ago

Same experience. It was awesome watching a massive Heidelberg press print hundreds of four color, die cut boxes with blind emboss and UV coating a minute. Even after I had competent art directors working for me, I'd still sometimes tag along for press checks on new products because it was just cool to see.

Electronic distribution is awesome, but there was something magical about seeing customers grabbing my boxed software off an end cap at Best Buy. Always fun if a customer was reading the box to walk up and ask if they had any questions. They'd ask "Oh, do you work here?" I'd just smile and say, "No, but I'm pretty familiar with that software."

fnord772• 1 month ago

tl;dr: plain old silkscreen printing. Nothing revolutionary

SoftTalker2• 1 month ago

Today it would be a vinyl wrap, so interesting to see the old tech if you didn't know about it.

fnord772• 1 month ago

I suppose, but my local high school art class does some silk screen printing, so it's not dead

sowbug• 1 month ago

The article mentions the "registration" process. Those multicolored gunsight-like symbols you sometimes see on the edges of printed things are called registration marks. They help the operator quickly judge whether the plates are aligned. Slightly different from the pins and stops the article mentions; those are to align the screens, while the marks are to see whether the result is aligned.

This is all familiar to people above a certain age. Younger folks who grew up without Sunday color comics might still be able to find a slightly blurry plus sign on the bottom of a paper milk carton.

MdRobiul• 1 month ago

yesfitz• 1 month ago

After 30+ years of decals and wraps being the way to decorate arcade and pinball cabinets, Spooky Pinball reintroduced direct-printing, known as "butter cabs"[1]. Although this time via large inkjet-type printers.

Just like the screenprinted Atari cabinets, it's worth seeing the Spooky butter cabs in-person. While decals have come a long way in fidelity and application, there's a feeling of satisfaction when the image is part of the object, rather than on the object.

1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pTbtn-tasXM

nasalgoat• 1 month ago

It's still dot sublimation printing versus screened artwork. It looks good but you can't get the spot colours like you can with screens.

How did Atari apply side art to Arcade Cabinets?

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