Pixels and elbow grease.

In case you're wondering where I'm pulling these great old images from, please allow me to reiterate: as I completed each of these illustrations, but before I delivered them to the clients, if I had the time, I was in the habit of banging off either a 5"X7" or 8"X10" transparency for my own record, and maintaining a file of these images. Remember, this was long ...well, not really long...before the internet, DVD's, hard drives. the freakin' Cloud et cetera. I guess I had a premonition I wouldn't be seeing many of those pieces again.

Transparencies on my desktop lightbox

With the technology at my fingertips today, I am able to scan these transparencies at very high rez, and take them into Photoshop (where I make my living today...) and inch by inch, clean them up and produce very nice remastered prints of the original art, the way it looked when I handed it to Atari, SNK, Capcom, you name it. These are clear of titles, obstructions, crawlers, and all the rest of the crap the designers had to stick in there!

 2048, High tech assassin Strider Hiryu
wields his plasma sword Cypher. 

As you can see in the progress on my remaster of Capcom's Strider, I was able to get in very tight on Strider Hiryu's face and on the detail on the Kazhak Guard's AK assault rifle.

These are the sorts of areas that often require quite a bit of clean up when you're working on a 30 year old large scale transparency! Even with plastic sleeves and in protective boxes there were many flaws and tiny scratches to be removed.
The results are worth the effort though.

I guess the AK will still be out there in 2048!

Strider Hiryu, Elvis sytle!