There’s no way to begin describing this process that doesn’t sound sad and strange so let’s hit the high points:
- The big (3 foot by 6 foot) blank wall that you face in the stairwell while walking into our basement game room really needed something.
- I had the idea of covering it with a mosaic of classic arcade characters made from Legos.
- I built Mario as a trial run which sold the wife on it ( http://www.brickshelf.com/cgi-bin/gallery.cgi?f=129715) and then found Donkey Kong as well which further cemented the deal.
- I couldn’t find any other examples so I decided to render other characters from Mame (arcade emulator) screenshots.
- I found LDraw ( http://www.ldraw.org) which is a Lego CAD program (seriously uber-geek).
- By zooming in on the Mame screenshots I was able to create them in Legos using LDraw
- I exported the images from LDraw, sized them to actual size and printed them out so that we could get an idea about layout.
- After we had the final design I printed the Material Sheet from each character (from LDraw) and got a total of the brick colors/types that I needed.
- I ordered the bricks from 2 vendors on http://www.bricklink.com/.
- I ordered the green Lego baseplates that the mural was built on directly from the Lego Store website ( http://www.lego.com).
- I glued (Liquid Nails) the baseplates to a piece of 1/4″ fiber board that was cut to fit the wall.
- The whole family got involved in building the characters.
- A couple of dry wall screws later and the project was complete.
I wanted to put this webpage together to first of all brag 🙂 and to also post the LDraw files so that the next arcade junkie would have it a little easier. If you have any questions feel free to email me at jason@idleamusements.com .
Enjoy.
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The End Result |
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Here is the finished project mounted to the wall. The gaps you see in the Karateka guys leg and a few other places are where the screws are holding the mural to the wall. They were later covered up with Legos. Below are closeups of the individual games rendered from LDraw.For a zip file of all the LDraw files for all of characters Click Here.The kids and the adults had a blast building it and we get to enjoy it everyday. |
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Closeups |
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| Game | Image Rendered from LDraw |
| Centipede |  |
| DigDug |  |
| Excite Bike |  |
| Frogger |  |
| Frontline |  |
| Galaga |  |
| Galaxian |  |
| Karateka |  |
| Donkey Kong |  |
| Mario |  |
| Mr Do |  |
| Ms Pacman |  |
| Pacman |  |
| Pacman Ghost |  |
| Pengo |  |
| Rally X |  |
| Space Invaders |  |
| Wizard of Wor |  |