A retro-gaming poster for the “Museo Games” exhibition

Retro-gaming enters the museum

Not retained poster project for the "Muséo Games" exhibition. This temporary exhibition organized by the Musée des Arts et Métiers will retrace four decades of video game history, from the very first generations (Pong, PacMan or Space Invaders) to the latest console games.

The pixel art

We recommend a Pixel Art visual, as this type of illustration naturally evokes the world of video games. We're proposing a "panorama of video game history" illustration in which all generations of consoles and games are present. Pong, Pac Man, Sonic, Mario, Tetris and co are brought together in a playful, colorful visual that will appeal to gamers as much as to the traditional family audience.

Like a Proust's madeleine, everyone will be able to find elements of their own videogame experience. The vocabulary of the games (Game Over, Next Level, Bonus...) finds its place in small yellow vignettes that punctuate the illustration. The entire poster is produced in pixel-art: the visuals, the title block, and we could take the principle to the extreme by redrawing the partner logos in pixel-art.

RGB" colors are used for titles and text. These are the 3 basic colors of screens, and are therefore naturally associated with the world of video games. This illustration can be used on several color backgrounds. It is also modular and can be recomposed at will to adapt to different communication media formats.

Some research...

Our second graphic proposal is also produced in Pixel Art, but in a more minimalist style. It's a series of four visuals in which the Musée des Arts et Métiers logotype is hijacked and set in the environment of cult video games: Pac Man, Arkanoid, Tetris and Zelda. Impactful and surprising, these visuals are homages to the history of video games. Original black backgrounds, stripped-down icons, geometric shapes and garish colors. Minimalist language, but evocative power !

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Ranting against calls for tender !

It was a compensated invitation to tender, admittedly symbolic, but compensated.
We had therefore put a lot of energy into this proposal (who has ever tried Pixel Art?...) and it was with surprise and regret that we received a reply informing us that the "consultation did not go ahead".

After all the effort and hope we've put into this project, we find this response a little short. In particular, we had serious doubts about the "last-minute reorientation of the project"... Why redirect a project during the consultation process? Knowing that several agencies were working unnecessarily...
The time commitment is enormous for a structure like ours (around 12 working days). We're not complaining about not being selected, because that's the rule of the game in a invitation to tender, but the game is worth the fight when the chances of winning the project are fairly guaranteed.

Our investment of time (and therefore our financial investment) is only conceivable if we have confidence in the rules of the game. So why change the rules along the way?
In short, these are the kinds of doubts that undermine confidence and discourage us from repeating this kind of experience.