As a surprise and center piece at my Heads Up! show, (March 2nd- April 4th) I refurbished and completely customized a Marvel Vs. Capcom 2 arcade cabinet! MVC2 was one of the last arcade fighting games that Capcom released before arcades were taken over by home entertainment systems. It is one the best and most beautiful arcade games ever made. After restoring the cabinet itself, I replaced all the surface components plexiglass, buttons, etc and finished it up with custom artwork. The work that went into rebuilding this cabinet was an art show in itself...below I documented some of the process:
Here's the original cabinet after I bought it and began removing the old components and vacuuming up the spiders and possums inside.
Next I recut and replaced the plexiglass and began restoring 12 years of damage to the cabinet. Lots of shaving, filling, and sanding. Finally I replaced and repainted every component.
After that I completely removed the old controls and ordered tournament style joysticks, internal components and custom LED buttons. When I got the new controls I had no idea how to wire the electic components of the LED's and even worse the 1st Player side wasn't even responding. Enter my friend Jason Holland and his brother Jesse. Jason is a talented artist who is finishing up a degree in industrial design and his brother is an Air-force Computer engineer or something crazy like that...anyway them Holland boys had the cabinet up and running in no time. Thank God for you two!
Although I am absolutely amazed by the art and animation in the game I never liked the Marvel Vs. Capcom 2 logo much so I remade it in a color palette that tied into the rest of the show. I also painted 10 new characters specifically for the game cabinet (5 from the Marvel Universe, and 5 from Capcom). The new cabinet art was printed and applied to custom cut plexiglass by the fantastic folks at New Port Graphics. Below is the finished cabinet in all it's glory! BTW the cabinet, like all the other art pieces in the show is for sale. =)
Can you feel the joy wafting off that beautiful thing?
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