How did Atari apply side art to Arcade Cabinets?

Some years ago, I had a boxed software product made. I went to the box factory with a disk with the imagery, and sat down with the woman who made up the printing plates. She aligned the imagery to a box template, and I signed off approval. Connected to her Mac was a lithography plate maker the size of a car. That made the masters by photolithography.

I was invited to see the press. After putting on earplugs, we went into the press room. The press was a sheet-fed press about a hundred feet long, turning out about one large sheet per second. It was capable of something like fourteen layers, so it could do glossy and flat areas, intense saturated colors, shiny seals, and other special effects. Most of the time it ran with four to seven colors. That day it was turning out art prints, of the sort that appear in hotel rooms. When the box business was slow, they printed artworks.

Press setup and alignment was time-consuming. Cost about $4000 for the first box, $0.25 for the second and later boxes. The big advancement in presses in this century is that the alignment and color ink distribution settings are now automated, so there's a lot less trial and error at the beginning of each run. Older presses have a huge number of knobs and cranks.

That's the next step up in volume from silk-screening.

I thought it worth mentioning that stickers were in the mix too. In the town I grew up in, there was a printing company that made them for Atari. I recall being brought to a "local industry expo" event as a kid, and I have a vivid memory of seeing heavy-duty vinyl (?) stickers for "Pole Position" at this company's stand. They would have been designed to be applied to the marquees and control panels of the upright cabinet.

I would imagine that on the big industrial printers that are using a metal mesh screen and thicker emulsion, it's maybe closer to 50? Usually in a print shop doing a big run, there'll be four or five screens made for each print layer so when one gets worn, it's replaced in the printing rack. It really is an artform.

And the video in the post was sourced and uploaded by...the blog post author.

Also, let's be serious, that blog has been writing about arcade related things for over a decade https://arcadeblogger.com/2013/04/01/1814065/ and running a podcast since 2020, and the author wrote a book in 2020.

One could say he puts real effort into all this, you know?

But seriously it does read well like normal thoughtful human writing, so I am on the side of it not being “AI slop” while also noting that you didn’t claim it was.