Many are celebrating the start of the eighth generation of video games consoles today, with the launch of the PlayStation 4 in the US… seemingly ignoring that the Wii U was released last year. On this frabjous day, i’ve decided to share my gaming machines icons pack.
I started the pack years ago to use with emulators and practise my pixel art. Initially drawn up for 256 colours and 32×32 dimensions, they don’t use that old Windows standard colour palette now, yet the CDs are the only icons that go over 32 colours, and the only ones which took anything more than the Pencil tool to create.
I have a few older revisions kicking around, so can show you some improvements that came with time:
This time I was led to tinker with the ‘collection’ by a slate of new console launches, as well as this article about a man photographing many gaming consoles, handhelds and computers for Wikipedia.
They’ve been confined to my hard drive alone until now. There are packs out there with more consoles, large photo-realistic images, even pixel packs to make one drool… nevertheless, as by the rifleman’s creed, “there are many like it, but this one is mine”.
You can click on either of the below images to go download the pack at DeviantArt.
Some icons have the tiniest changes – the Dreamcast had a different coloured logo depending on its region, while the PS2 could be orientated horizontally or vertically, with and without a stand. Some varieties are more obvious: Consoles have been made smaller and cheaper late in their lifespans, or had completely different casings depending on the region (see the USA’s SNES variant).
If you can name them all, you’re a geek or a cheat!