We’ve had some incredible competitions on Kotaku in the past, but I would say this is definitely up there in terms of the sheer quality of the entries. It was almost impossible to judge, but now we have our winners.
First off I want to give a big thanks to everyone who entered. The standard was ridiculously high. The main winner receives the Arcade Unit and a t-shirt, the nine runners up receive a t-shirt, and the remaining five honourable mentions receive an Atari poster.
And the Winner of the new Atari Arcade Unit is…
Main Winner
Jack Gillin
I’m currently studying animation at the Victorian College of the Arts and decided to give a stop motion atari share house a crack.
After seeing all the other entrants I decided to cram in as many Atari references as possible.
It took me about 7 hours of shooting, and although theres some rough bits, I think it turned out alright. Although I forgot to finish Miner Willy’s legs!
Runners Up
Alex Di Giovanni
Inspired by the original retro artworks used with Breakout manuals, covers and the like, I wanted to create a more abstract idea to represent the game rather than a straight representation of the exact gameplay and graphics.
Then, I added some fins to lower wind resistance. And this racing stripe here, I feel is pretty sharp.
Andrew Marshall
I was first introduced to gaming on our family’s Atari 800XL computer. I loved playing games like ‘Rescue on Fractalus’ and ‘Ball Blazer’, and was especially fascinated at the contrast between the realistic fantasy worlds depicted on the cover art and the basic blocky graphics depicted on screen. I thought it would be fun to mix these two sides of the Atari coin together, and create alternative box art for the classic game Berzerk. To cover off the realism side I chose to make it a photography project, with a human model representing the player. Then, as an homage to the meagre graphical power of the Atari, I created two life size pixel art robot enemies from the game out of pizza boxes, before snapping the image I am submitting as my entry. As a final bit of fun, I then left the robots in situ, as my own geeky addition to the street art of the city. Thanks!
Benjamin Hale
I wanted my picture to have the pixel graphic style of the old games. It was done in MS Paint only and from a blank image, it took many hours to turn it into the final product. I wanted my picture to cover multiple games and I felt the best way to do that was to make a sort of collage. The theme of the image is earth is under attack by alien ships and there are a few battles raging here and there. One ship is trying to prevent large asteroids from being hurled at earth. A missile base on the moon is protecting some of the colonies from being fired upon. On earth an experimental anti-air vehicle is firing at some alien dropships while dodging the incoming fire.
David Barlas
I drink therefore I am, pac-man.
Edward Del Villar
I tried to think of what those awesome retro games would look like if they existed in the real world today. At first I was going to try and make ‘realistic’ versions of the game characters, but then I realised that their charm lies in their pixelated simplicity and they couldn’t be easily rendered realistically without losing a part of what made them special. Then I had the idea of having a real hedge maze mixed in with Pac-Man, so I looked through Google Earth for some outdoor hedge mazes, but then thought that a city would be cooler, as in many ways the criss-crossing streets echo the design of a Pac-Man screen.
Garret Townsend
I wanted to mash together three of my dorkiest loves- comics, dumb tattoos and, of course, gaming. I lost hours as a kid playing the Gauntlet series and this seemed like a funny/ridiculous way to both show my love for the series and to finally make productive use of the Atari tattoo I got in high school. Plus, who wouldn’t want to be a rad hero with an axe?!
Janet White
I was telling a friend last week how cool the creator/s of Atari must be and how Pong in particular was an awesome childhood memory. He then sent me the link to this comp. I felt like it was meant to be but just wanted to draw the creator not necessarily a game. So I kind of compromised and if you look closely you will see that Pong is reflected in Nolan’s eyes 🙂
Nicole Lawson
I love Pong, and I always think of a bad smell when I see the name, ( Pong is slang for bad smell for those who don’t know 😛 ) so I thought it would be funny if two smelly people were hitting soap at each other with their armpits. The end.
Scott Fowler
I briefly thought the competition rules said “create a visual work USING any of the entire stable of Atari games” And I went for it! I plugged in the Spectravision Compumate (Atari computer addon) And used it’s drawing program to wrestle out an image onto the screen.
This is my retro version of the prize, re imagined as a Kotaku Arcade (because I’m a suck up :p). Hope you guys enjoy!
Honourable Mentions
Braycen Jackwitz
I was playing some of the games on the Atari Arcade website and I thought to myself “I wonder what it’d be like if these games were all combined into one?” So, yeah. That happened.
Calem Whitling
Moved into my first appartment with a childhood mate last year and figured the place needed some suitably nostalgic wall decoration. Got some tape and UV spray paint and mocked up this invader one weekend. Looks great under the blacklight.
Gary Kew
I knew I wanted to create something using Dig Dug characters . I loved that game!
But apart from dressing up as the characters themselves I thought the best way was to create miniature versions of them using dyed starch. The idea of the Dig Dug aquarium / ant-farm popped into my head (way harder to make than I initially thought!). And I just built everything else around it.
Noel Wheatley
I’m not much of artist, but I love all the old school arcade machines I grew up with and space invaders was one of my favorites and considering I spend a lot of my time working in excel I decided to use what I know to try and show my Atari love
Tadeo Baljevic
I used 3ds max to create all the elements in the scene, before using an ink&paint shader to give them the outlined look. I next rendered a high-quality image out and brought it into GIMP where I added a video-stripe effect as well as a burned corners vignette.
The image is inspired by asteroids, which was one of my all-time favourite games as a child.
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