Ana Kuster • Atari 2600

Research & Inspiration

For this project, I knew from the start that I wanted to take a lot of inspiration from actual old commercials of this game console. My mission was to produce something that felt right at home next to the classic 70s and 80s Atari ads, with the modern twist of complex 3D animation.

I watched a multitude of Atari commercials and took notes on how they presented the console, as well as their whole brand identity. After getting a feel for the kinds of visual effects that were common in these commercials, I immediately got to work on storyboarding my video, as well as modeling the console.

Modeling & UV Mapping

I recreated the console with Cinema 4D's own modeling tools. Nearly the entire console is made of simple procedural materials, with the only exception being the control panel. For the panel, I crudely drew the symbols and letterforms with my mouse inside C4D, extracted the UV map, brought it into Photoshop, used the doodled elements as a visual guide for where the neat final elements needed to go on the UV, then put that back onto the model in C4D. The Asteroids cartridge also had its UV map made in the same way.

It was a bit of a challenge to use the reference images I collected for this project. As I learned during my research, the Atari 2600 had several versions that featured slight visual differences. My model most resembles the "Light Sixer" version, but I was required to use images of other versions for a few key angles and measurements. Using these other images, I had to combine a few details from different Atari 2600 models into one, so my Atari 2600 doesn't really exist. (Not that anyone will notice...I hope...)