IM RADField survey by Konrad Ziemlewski

VIDEO GAMES ANDCOMPUTER HOLDING POWER

My chosen topic for the Field Survey brief ended up being “Video Games and Computer Holding Power” after a good few days of deciding. I had initially went along with this topic due to my interest in video games in general as well as my fascination with related subjects.The general ideas behind the topic seemed to be split into a number of attribute; history, benefits, setbacks, attitude. The first few pages were about video games history mentioning some of the earliest video games (Space Wars, Pacman, Space Invaders etc) and what had their impact been on the world. Following this there was a piece about the benefits (the majority) and the setbacks (the minority) which were related to gaming. Throughout this there had also been some home truths told about the attitude to gaming, and how comparing gaming to watching tv is wrong.Throughout all the articles I noticed one theme going, which was gaming is being misunderstood. Therefore I had decided from this to create a set of promotional posters, for some of the games mentioned in the article just like it has been done for movies.I had also throughout my reseach noticed a style i liked (Minimalism) and decided to put this style through the posters I had produced. Minimalists concentrate on having only the bare essentials of an image or product, rather then fancy extras, to bring out the inner beauty so to speak of an idea.

This is the first of my promotional posters to do with the wildly popular game called Asteroids. The game was launched in 1979 by Atari, and went on to be one of the most popular games ever and an icon. For the poster I tried to stick to the colour scheme and style of the original game (line drawing and white). For the poster I had recreated a piece of the game, added a slogan which I felt suited the games story, and the name of the game (all done in the original font seen in the game). I had also decided to keep a theme going throughout all the posters I did, which was done by using a texture to create a slightly worn/old effect due to the age of the games themselves.

This poster was one of two I had created for Pacman. Pacman was released in 1980 by Namco and is still often played today at the arcades or on the modern consoles. With this poster I kept to the colour scheme of the game; the yellow for pacman, and blue for one of the colours of the ghosts. I had wanted to add a slight comedic element to the piece without swaying away too much from my minimalistic style. I did this by turning the tables on the original idea of the game, by giving Pacman a gun for him to take his re-venge on the ghosts. I centered the images to make them as asthetically pleasing as possible, and tried to keep the colours fairly complimentary. I used the original font seen in Pacman, and as well as a LCD like font for the main tagline of this poster.

This poster was one of two I had created for Pacman. Pacman was released in 1980 by Namco and is still often played today at the arcades or on the modern consoles. With this poster I kept to the colour scheme of the game; the yellow for pacman, and blue for one of the colours of the ghosts. I had wanted to add a slight comedic element to the piece without swaying away too much from my minimalistic style. I did this by turning the tables on the original idea of the game, by giving Pacman a gun for him to take his re-venge on the ghosts. I centered the images to make them as asthetically pleasing as possible, and tried to keep the colours fairly complimentary. I used the original font seen in Pacman, and as well as a LCD like font for the main tagline of this poster.

For the second poster, I decided to do one with only the villains of the game which are the ghosts. I created them in their classic 8bit look, all with the original colours. The texture over the top toned down the colours just like I wanted and gave them more depth. Once again the images were centered to make them aesthetically pleasing and so was the Pacman text, done in yellow to represent Pacman.

For the second poster, I decided to do one with only the villains of the game which are the ghosts. I created them in their classic 8bit look, all with the original colours. The texture over the top toned down the colours just like I wanted and gave them more depth. Once again the images were centered to make them aesthetically pleasing and so was the Pacman text, done in yellow to represent Pacman.

This is the main and first of four posters I had made for the iconic game known as Space Invaders(the games release was in 1978). Once I knew I was going to do a space invaders poster, I had the tagline “their invaders... from space” constantly in my head, so I wanted to relate the poster to it. I did this by initially choosing a very oldschool, bold, cartoony font, seen quite often in movies to do with aliens. Then I went on recreating a scene from the game, and I had decided to add colour to the aliens, due to the fact that in white the poster didnt seem very eye catching (chose the colours from the updated version of the game). I kept to the minimalistic style, by not including too many objects and having a fair bit of empty space. After centering the majority of the poster I was fairly happy with the final outcome.

This last set of 3 posters promoting Space Invaders was hugely inspired by one major movie advertising campaign. District 9, a movie released in 2009, had a poster campaign (on telephone boxes and bus stops), which consisted of just an alien and the title of the movie. This was very much minimalist, and something I wanted to emulate with these posters. Therefore I decided to enlarge each one of the invaders, have one per poster, completely central to the page, and just have the title of the game right at the bottom. This created mystery, asked questions of the viewer, and would engage the viewer in finding out what this product is.

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