My memories of the arcades from the 80′s are firmly wrapped around the sound of those little gold tokens spitting out of a change machine at the Aladdin’s Castle. So when it came time to decide between free play, quarters or tokens in my game room, it was an easy choice.

Of course it isn’t so easy to actually find the plastic inserts to modify the coin reject button for tokens. 25¢ inserts were standard and are easy to find, you can even buy them new. Atari and a few other game manufacturers had their own custom graphic inserts, but a generic “tokens” insert is a rare item for some reason.

Of all the games in my game room only one had a coin door with an insert that said “TOKENS” on it, so it would have to do. I pulled it out and scanned the insert (above). I decided to try my had at using Adobe Illustrator and while I was doing OK, the original font had so many bleeds and errors in the print that I decided to take a different route. I did a font match and simply re-typed the text. I figured that since I could put whatever I wanted, “TOKENS ONLY” would be appropriate.

I finished up my first illustrator file and filled up an 8.5 x 11 space with my new insert. I used a laser printer and printed on vellum to get the desired transparency. My toner didn’t print the blacks as dark as I’d like, but still a good first effort. I used an extra piece of vellum to back up the printed image, which made it a little closer to the original effect.

Thanks to mikesarcade for the 25¢ insert image which can be downloaded from his site for free. If you’re interested in printing your own “TOKENS ONLY” inserts, drop me a line. Can’t wait to get all my coin doors properly labeled! Happy gaming.

Tags: coin door, inserts, tokens, tokens only

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 21st, 2009 at 11:39 pm and is filed under Artwork, Misc. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.