Yie-Ar Kung-Fu Custom Cabinet

I’m embarking on a new-to-me bavacade adventure, namely working with Bryan Mathers to create custom side art for the 1985 fighter Yie-Ar Kung-Fu. This game was the most popular arcade conversion kit of 1985. What’s a conversion kit? It often refers to a board modification that enables operators to convert an older, less popular game into a brand new title—all without buying a new cabinet. It probably made good sense for the arcade owners back-in-the-day, and such conversions helped the industry recover from the video game crash of 1983. But the conversion kits often meant that the cabinets were never really as iconic as their predecessors, and the first thing to go was usually attention to the art, which was definitely the case with Yie-Ar. The side art was a slap on, rectangular image that does little justice to the various characters you challenge along the way.

Yie-Ar Kung-Fu side art

I got one of those Yie-Ar Kung-Fu conversion kits in a Defender cabinet a few years ago, and recently did some work to clean it up and add wheels. Rather than buying a reproduction sticker for the side art, I thought it would be cool to dream up some custom art for this cabinet. This is something I’ve seen folks do in the hobby, and it can make for an awesome art project. Problem is I’m not a graphic artist, but then I thought of the magical Bryan Mathers, so I reached out and he is game.

Fairly intact original Defender side art under 3 coats of paint

So, the cabinet we will be creating the art for is a previously converted Defender cabinet that has a very distinctive shape. When sanding down the various coats of paint the original art work appeared. What’s more, it was in very good shape! We primed over it as a layer of protection in the event someone wants to reclaim this cabinet in the future.

Defender Cabinet primed and ready for custom art

So we know the shape of the cabinet, and Bryan and I chatted about possible side art, and I was hoping to highlight the different backgrounds which are a cave-based waterfall for level one rounds, and a Japanese palace for level two. So using those backgrounds on the side art somehow would be cool.

Cave-dwelling waterfall background

Japanese palace background

Then I thought of the side art from the Sidam Explorer,  which features comic panels with an abstracted, brooding astronaut:

So amazing, then the idea brewed that we might do 11 unique panels each featuring one of the various characters you fight. perhaps 6 on one side and 5 on the other. Perhaps highlighting the cave fights on one side and the palace fights on another? I don’t know, but it sounded awesome in the moment. Bryan is planning on using a 3-D rendering of a defender cabinet  to fit the panels together like a puzzle, and then work within those pieces to see how it all looks in glorious 3D, so wild:

I’m not sure if the above model is what Bryan will use, but I really dug the idea of him modelling it all in 3D and building virtually first to figure out how to fit the panels to match the cabinet, see what colors will work,  and get a sense of the design in three dimensions, etc. Once we have that all locked-in, I will find a someone here in Italy who can do a hi-res print to vinyl. So, this is the beginning of what will be my first custom art conversion kit that will be a true one-of-a-kind in the bavacade. YEAH!

Leading with the Art

One of the smartest things Reclaim Hosting has ever done was to partner with Bryan Mathers for our art. The prospect of sitting down with Bryan to collaboratively brainstorm how to communicate what we do visually is an absolute joy, I cannot recommend the experience highly enough. Our brand was in many ways grounded in his first Reclaim Hosting vinyl logo Bryan doodled while we were chatting in Barcelona back in April of 2015. It was love at first sight. And that has since been the basis of an entire Reclaim brand that has been consistently fun and fetching.

Original Reclaim Hosting visual Bryan Mathers doodled

We have used him innumerable times since then to prepare our various products as well as teaming with ALT to build out an entire conference theme for OERxDomains21—which may be a high-water mark for our collaborations. Anyway, Bryan is amazing and few months ago we worked with him to not come up with an aesthetic for our upcoming conference Reclaim Open (which we have yet to unveil in its entirety) as well as try and upgrade our main site header image to subtly suggest the changing nature of our business thanks to the advent of Reclaim Cloud—which is now almost 3 years old, which is insane to even think about.

A sneak peek of some of the Reclaim open art in technicolor

As you can see from the header old reclaimhosting.com header image that we had on our site for close to 8 or 9 years, the VHS tapes were applications that could be easily run within cPanel, such as Drupal, WordPress, MediaWiki, Scalar, Omeka, etc. All supporting the “Zombies” home recorded tape All of this not only assumes the coming of the copyright zombies and the learning undead, but also that you would be “playing” these tapes within cPanel.

Old Reclaim Hosting Header image

Our new header image sticks with the VHS metaphor (although it might be begging for a laserdisc or DVD makeover here soon) but cPanel is now just one of the tapes you can play. What’s more, several of these tapes (namely Scalar, WordPress, Omeka, and WordPress) can be played in either cPanel or Reclaim Cloud, while others (like PeerTube, Ghost, and Docker) are exclusive to the new Reclaim Cloud containers. It begs all kinds of format and backward compatibility parallels that the old media metaphors real map on our shift from an exclusively cPanel shop to a much broader library of applications for folks to choose from.

Reclaim Hosting’s New Site Header

Again, Bryan works on so many levels that are both inviting and soothing while at the same time epitomizing these subtle, yet crucial, changes we are trying to communicate to our community. What’s more, all of these tapes on the Reclaim shelf fall under the aegis of a new element of Reclaim Hosting rolled almost a year ago now: Reclaim EdTech. And that tapes sits horizontally above the other to highlight an umbrella of support for both cPanel and Reclaim Cloud. It’s so beautiful!

You’ll also notice nothing changed with the “My Blog” tape, that one is sacred