One of the most fascinating sequences in Atari’s arcade manufacturing process in the early 80s, was the application of the fabulous artwork that adorned all of its cabinets from the golden age of arcade gaming. So this week, I thought it would be interesting to take a look at how this cabinet artwork was actually printed.

The technique used is called screen printing (often called silkscreen printing), and it’s a world away from the large-format digital printers used today.

Let’s take a look at the process in action. This great footage shows the process in full. Shot in 1982, the cabinet sides being printed are for Atari’s Quantum arcade cabinet – it is interesting that this happened to be filmed at the time, as the cabinet run was relatively low, at only 500 cabinets:

Atari coin-op screen printing process

What you’re seeing there, isn’t a giant sticker being applied. Atari is printing the artwork directly onto the cabinet side panel. And here’s the key bit; it is being done one colour at a time.

To create a side-art design, Atari’s artists first had to break the artwork into individual colour layers. Each colour required its own printing screen.

For example, if a design contained light blue, dark blue, red, yellow and black, then five separate screens would be created.

Each screen contained only the areas for a single colour. When all of the colours were printed in sequence, one layer on top of another, they combined to create the finished artwork. Over time, Atari would get smarter at this process and mix say, a blue with a yellow on top to create a green.

The screens themselves were large rectangular frames fitted with a tightly stretched mesh. The artwork wasn’t painted directly onto the screen. Instead, artists created a separate piece of photographic film for each colour. These films were typically clear acetate sheets with opaque black artwork representing the areas that would print. Here’s an example from Missile Command:

Instructions for the screen printers for this particular film. “Mission Command” I think was an unintentional spelling mistake!

A ‘film positive’ for Atari’s Missile Command. This film is for the black parts of the side art

The film positive was placed over a screen that was coated with light-sensitive emulsion, and then exposed to bright light. The exposed emulsion on the screen below hardened, while the areas hidden by the black artwork remained soft and would then be washed away. The result was a stencil in the mesh that allowed ink to pass through only where that particular colour was needed.

In the footage above, you can see the side panel positioned beneath a large printing head. Let’s watch it again from the 50 second mark:

Atari coin-op screen printing process

A screen is lowered onto the panel and ink is spread across the mesh using a rubber squeegee. The pressure forces ink through the open areas of the stencil (determined by the black parts of the film positives), and onto the wood surface below. When the screen lifts, you can clearly see that one colour section is printed onto the panel. The panel then moves on to the next station where another screen adds the next colour. This process would be repeated several times until the artwork was complete.

The secret to producing clean-looking side-art was something printers call registration. Every screen had to line up perfectly with the colours that had already been printed. If a screen shifted even slightly, outlines would appear blurry and colours would overlap incorrectly. To prevent this, the printing tables used locating pins, stops and alignment guides that ensured each panel returned to exactly the same position for every pass.

Considering the speed of production, it’s impressive how accurately these operators worked.

Rows of Millipede side panels, printed and ready for construction. Notice the left and right hand panels next to each other. Interesting the t-molding is already applied…

Atari used a semi-automatic flatbed screen-printing system rather than a completely manual setup. This made sense when you consider something like Missile Command had a production run of 14,000 cabinets. This required 28,000 panels to be printed! So any form of automation would have helped speed this process up.

The production line would have included:

Large screen-printing frames
Photographic colour-separation films
Light-sensitive emulsions
Registration fixtures and alignment guides
Screen-printing inks
Industrial squeegee mechanisms
Drying or curing stations between passes

The machinery handled much of the movement, but trained operators were still essential for setup, colour control and quality inspection.

Newly printed Centipede cabinet sides waiting for construction

One reason original Atari side-art still looks so vibrant today is that screen printing lays down a relatively thick, opaque layer of ink. Unlike modern inkjet printing, colours aren’t built from tiny dots. Each colour is applied as a solid layer, giving the artwork a richness and depth that’s difficult to replicate.

When you see a Missile Command cabinet with bright blues, vivid reds and crisp graphics, you’re looking at the result of multiple carefully aligned printing passes, each adding another layer to the final image.

Missile Command side art

Watching the footage today is a reminder that arcade cabinets weren’t simply wooden boxes that happened to contain videogames. They were industrially produced works of graphic art, that needed to be bold and colourful in order to stand out in arcades full of games from various manufacturers. This meant that every stripe, logo and illustration on an Atari cabinet passed through a painstaking sequence of screen-printing operations before the game ever reached an arcade floor. Long before digital printers and vinyl wraps became standard, Atari was creating its iconic cabinet artwork using a process that relied on craftsmanship, precision and a surprising amount of manual skill.

And that’s exactly why these cabinets still look so good more than forty years later.

You can check out another brief glimpse of the side art printing process in this video, of Atari Star Wars and Crystal Castles cabinets being built. Watch from 2:55 onwards:

Thanks for checking in this week – more cool stuff coming down the line!

Tony