I decided to turn my copy of Artcade, a wonderful coffee table book consisting of marquees from arcade machines, into wallpaper for the backwall of my “collection” room. As you can see from all the stickies in the book, I had a lot of great marquees to choose from. Like I said, it’s a great book and it was painful to pull it apart the way I did.
Artcade comprises full-color copies of marquees, as you can see below. My biggest challenge was picking the marquees as I was both short of wallspace and sometimes really cool games were back-to-back in the book and I didn’t want to buy a second copy of the book. For example, I had to give up on both Asteroids and Asteroids Deluxe.
Wallpapering With Artcade Marquees
I used wallpaper paste to put them on the wall. As you can see the back wall of the room, I’m converting a long and narrow storage room, was just wide enough for three marquees. I started with the Star Wars games in order that the movies were released.
In the second picture below, I have three rows of marquees up. In hindsight I should have stopped at this point and let the paste dry. Although as you’ll see the wall looks great at a distance, up close you can see ripples in the paper. This was the first time I had ever put wallpaper up by myself, not that this was actual wallpaper. I think one of the challenges is that the paper is image quality for a coffee table book, exactly what you would expect, not the thick paper used for wall paper. However, a huge advantage is that the pieces are small and easy to work with.
When I was choosing the order of the marquees I wanted to have themes for the rows as best I could and take color into consideration too. For example, rows two and five are space games. Row three are Mario games and row four are classic arcade games. Regarding color, notice how I put the marquees with white backgrounds in the middle. I also put together a spreadsheet to organize what I wanted to do. Like I said, I wanted to choose the right marquees for this.
The Final Result
And here is the wall with all marquees up. With the exception of the bottom row these are all games that I loved as a kid. The superhero marquees at the bottom are a nod to my bookcase of graphic novels, mostly Marvel Masterworks, on another wall in my collection room.
The glass display cabinets, which are from IKEA (search for Milsbo), are meant to house my collection of 8-bit Atari computers. I have a third cabinet, not shown here, for peripherals.
