I just realized that I haven’t had a post run for a few days on the blog, and while there isn’t much news that isn’t related to The Thing Which Shall Not Be Named, it has meant that there is time for putting together other articles. We did get some of this with the recent reworked arcade art post, and that had my thinking about another wealth of art found in arcades – flyers.
Flyers have been on my mind between a discussion on the Arcade Heroes Discord server and seeing a few things on Twitter this past week. Flyers have always had a role in the industry, with the primary purpose of them being to interest an operator into buying the machine. How well flyers do this has been quite uneven – sometimes a flyer was designed to be like a mini-manual, in others they’ve been almost entirely pointless. You also have to appreciate those that went all the way and have a miniature comic book built into them, like with Sega’s Galaxy Force brochure; or since a fast-action arcade game can’t convey it, lay out a full backstory to the events, as Atari did with the Millipede flyer.
One thing that I miss from the occasional appearance of modern flyers, is using them to not only inform you, but to build on the lore of the game through well-produced art. This is what companies like Atari did for their home games, as discussed in my review of The Art of Atari. Granted, it’s not entirely fair to only point the finger at modern flyers, as there are some from the past that likewise didn’t really tell you about the product or make any effort to spruce things up with artwork. But, when I look at modern flyers, I am hard

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