How did Atari apply side art to Arcade Cabinets?

One of the most fascinating sequences in Atari’s arcade manufacturing process in the early 80s, was the application of the fabulous artwork that adorned all of its cabinets from the golden age of arcade gaming. So this week, I thought it would be interesting to take a look at how this cabinet artwork was actually printed.

The technique used is called screen printing (often called silkscreen printing), and it’s a world away from the large-format digital printers used today.

Let’s take a look at the process in action. This great footage shows the process in full. Shot in 1982, the cabinet sides being printed are for Atari’s Quantum arcade cabinet – it is interesting that this happened to be filmed at the time, as the cabinet run was relatively low, at only 500 cabinets:

Atari coin-op screen printing process

What you’re seeing there, isn’t a giant sticker being applied. Atari is printing the artwork directly onto the cabinet side panel. And here’s the key bit; it is being done one colour at a time.

To create a side-art design, Atari’s artists first had to break the artwork into individual colour layers. Each colour required its own printing screen.

For example, if a design contained light blue, dark blue, red, yellow and black, then five separate screens would be created.

Each screen contained only the areas for a single colour. When all of the colours were printed in sequence, one layer on top of another, they combined to create the finished artwork. Over time, Atari would get smarter at this process and mix say, a blue with a yellow on top to create a green.

The screens themselves were large rectangular frames fitted with a tightly stretched mesh. The artwork wasn’t painted directly onto the screen. Instead, artists created a separate piece of photographic film for each colour. These films were typically clear acetate sheets with opaque black artwork representing the areas that would print. Here’s an example from Missile Command:

Instructions for the screen printers for this particular film. “Mission Command” I think was an unintentional spelling mistake!

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