Title: Miniature Retro Game Screens
Date Completed: August 2019
Design: Lord Libidan
Count: 14
Canvas: Black
Colors: 12
Video Game: Pacman, Dig Dug, Donkey Kong
 
One of my most loved cross stitches is actually one of the first, my retro video game trio cross stitch. It’s simple, and it works. However, there’s only so much you can do with 8bit video games, there just isn’t the wealth of material to pull from to make complicated patterns. As a result, I’ve kept it as a great thing, but something that I probably wouldn’t go back to. That was until I found a cool phone stand.
 
Yeh, a phone stand. It was actually a phone stand made to play arcade games on, in the shape of an arcade cabinet. I had made a miniature Joust arcade cabinet cross stitch before, but it had always bugged me that it was only Joust, a game that isn’t really that well known. So I wanted to come up with an idea to replace the screens, but also allow me to swap out a phone.
 
This was a great idea in principle, but I was never going to give my phone away when someone wanted to show it off at an event, so I threw the idea away. By that time, however, I had made the screens that would fit into the cabinet. I once again thought about making the whole cabinet, but it would be larger than the last one, and it would be a bit derivative. But that didn’t mean the screens had to be. In fact, they fit rather well within a photo frame.
 
I wanted them to look a bit more like an 8bit game and so reduced the colors to 12 (even though you can have up to 256 colors on 8bit) and placed them side by side. A simple cross stitch, that still brings back the feelings of the retro gaming era.
 
Included are Pacman, Dig Dug (my favorite retro game) and Donkey Kong, which is the first time it’s been stitched up by me.