That’s right, Wico. The dissolution of the former partnership between Willis and Wico must be complete as the latter is now cranking out their own control panel overlays. Not quite sure if this was a licensed product, but I can’t imagine Wico would bootleg such an item, considering the two companies weren’t far from one another here in the Chicago area. I’ll call this a new old stock item, just made by Wico and not an OEM part from Williams.

The cpo is screen printed with nice die cuts, but on plain white backing. The color scheme is appealing to me, but the mountain range has been done a million times, boring. Overall it is a simple, clean overlay. Not much excitement, but I guess its better than an old worn out original. Not really, but I’ll archive it anyway.

Well, perhaps not exactly NOS as I just pulled it from the game I’ve been working on. I figured that since I spent the time to clean it up I might as well take a few pictures and add it to the archive for future reference. Hopefully it won’t be hanging around too long as the Tapper will be hitting the auction block once it is up and running.

This marquee is reverse screened on glass and in great shape overall, with none of the typical flaking frequently seen when artwork is printed on glass. It was a little difficult to photo graph and even harder to scan. The reflective quality of the glass was creating some weird shadows during the scanning process making the scans worthless. Anyway, a nice marquee for a great game.

This NOS overlay came with the batch of donated artwork from a fellow collector, check out the original post if you missed it. At first I wasn’t sure what game this cpo was for as I couldn’t find any information about Video Ware, Inc., at the usual sources. I posted a few online inquiries and quickly had an answer.

The control panel overlay is for Champion Boxing by Video Ware, Inc., licensed by Sega. This game was released in 1983 by Sega, likely in kit form only for conversions. I don’t recall seeing the game on location and considering that Nintendo’s Punch Out was released less than a year later, I imagine Champion Boxing did poorly. (more…)

Not the most exciting piece, but even boring control panel overlays have a place in arcade history. If you hung out at the arcade back in the late 80′s or early 90′s, you probably saw more than your fair share of generic control panel overlays.

This one is a standard space theme overlay, meant to be used with any number of space conversion kits or simply as a cheaper alternative to the pricey OEM* replacement parts. (more…)

Not too exciting I suppose, but Galaga is a true classic and worthy of recognition, even if it’s just about the cpo. This is one of the Namco reproduction overlays that I picked up awhile back to use in my Gaplus project. I have a Galaga UR and wanted to add Gaplus to the cab. I figured I could just install one of the double jamma adapters from Mikes Arcade and have both games in my Galaga cabinet. Gaplus uses an 8-way joystick and I wasn’t about to hack up my nice Galaga panel, so I picked up a crappy one and cut a hole for the 8-way joystick. (see that post here) This overlay is destined for that panel, if I ever get around to finishing the project!

After numerous unsuccessful attempts to sell my non-working Bud Tapper upright, I have decided to bite the bullet and restore this game myself. Once it’s cleaned up and brought back to life, it should bring a few bucks on eBay. Even with the depressed market on video games, a few classics still bring in more than average and Tapper is one of those games. (more…)

This is an odd little overlay. Beastie Feastie was produced by Cardinal Amusements as an upgrade kit for Pac-Man cabinets. Cardinal Amusements has a short history of odd ball upgrades for popular games, their only other kit being Street Heat for Donkey Kong. (more…)

I connected with another video game collector recently, Steve23, located in Georgia. I had referenced a Wico catalog, on my resource page in response to Steve’s Willis side art post on KLOV. He liked my efforts to preserve a little bit of the history behind the video game industry and messaged me. After a brief discussion via messages, Steve offered to donate a box of miscellaneous artwork to my preservation cause; very generous. (more…)

I’ve been working on a Reactor restoration for a friend, a very patient friend, because I think it was about an eternity ago that I started the project. I plan to wrap it up this winter and thought I would share some pictures of the artwork before it all gets applied. It’s very nice stuff. (more…)

Would I have walked up to a machine with this overlay proudly displayed, or just run away screaming? While sharks and explosions are enough to attract most pre-teen boys, I think even back in the 80′s I would have realized this was just plain awful. Quarters were precious back then and you had to choose your games wisely! (more…)