Creative Accuracy, Standards, and Best Practices

[Avar]

The audit's going well and I've found a lot of fantastic content I didn't know existed It's always been clear that all of our artists and contributors are extremely talented. One flaw in our process has caught my attention a few times, however. In some instances where source material was difficult to find or doesn't exist at all in the real world, some creators have occasionally filled the gaps by fabricating something original to put in its place.

While I would argue that this practice is a bit of a wasted effort relative to us working as a team to find the source material needed to make accurate art, it is technically acceptable as long as it's clear what's been fabricated and which sets contain fake art. The issue I'm encountering though is that once it becomes clear a set contains fake art,  it can be hard to separate real from fake without going game by game and visually comparing carts and boxes to pictures of the real thing over the course of dozens of hours per set. The simple fix for this is, moving forward, if we do make any adaptations/additions/fabrications to box/cart/disc/cassette art or any physical media, it'll help everyone out immensely if we include an unmissable readme before the file folder pointing out in notes what's fake, or what's made from source material the veracity of which is uncertain.

That being said, please don't feel like we have to fill every gap right away, as accuracy and quality should come before quantity. If you're ever working on a set and you can't find source material, let the community know here and I'm sure we can help. If nothing turns up quickly I'll do my best to personally track down a copy of the thing you need or reach out to other communities to find someone who has it. It might feel like this takes a bit longer but as a team we'll have saved a lot of time and we'll have better content in the long run

With AI improving the ways we can receive and distribute sets, our collective urge to kill art gaps with fire is going to ease. Until now we've all kinda held an ethos of "everything has to have a box and a cart, even if it doesn't have one in real life" because we felt that was the standard. To that I say, let's let the standard be excellence in accurate, high quality historical preservation. I'll keep actively auditing even after the audit's done so if, for example, you're working on a 3D box set and you can't find scans of the sides for a few boxes, don't feel obligated to fake it. We can just keep track of what's missing, find what we need and kill it with style later. If you ever need help with source material or physical media research, just let us know and we'll do our best to support your creative work

At the other end of the spectrum, please don't feel creatively hindered by any sense that every box/cart has to look the same or fit the system's "standard" for that type of physical media if real "non-standard" variants exist. If a game has a Special Edition, or a Limited Edition, or comes in a bigger box with some cool gizmo in it, we can totally have that in any official set. Hell, eventually it'd be amazing to have every variation but for now I'd settle for w/e the 1337est iteration of a game is, eg. gold Zelda cart, mini-arcade PS2 Space Invaders Anniversary, Onimusha 3 katana distro, etc. If a game shipped in a 12ft tall giant mech suit... we prolly wanna see that XD Basically, just please don't anyone feel like they're not able to use a cooler, more-different-but-still-real box just because it doesn't match the rest of the set.

If we're true to these philosophies, we'll only have to do any given job once, or at the very least we ensure that we get it done in such a manner that the team can pick up the torch again later and finish what was started without any hassles or having to worry about accuracy. Thanks for reading and y'all keep on bein' awesome!!

In the attached thread, I go into a bit more depth on the subject as it pertains to homebrews and prototypes that sometimes haven't yet received CiB or cart releases or that could just be the very ugly $3000 EEPROM some lucky bastard found in a dumpster:

 

[SupraKarma]

I agree with everything you said.

I'm on board.

I think my initial reasoning for wanting full box art and cartridge art was nothing more than OCD. But in the grand scheme of things, accuracy deserves more respect. I never put much thought into the fact that 'fake' art is the equivalent of faking history, until I actually had to try to figure out what was real and what was fake on my own.

HyperSpin deserves a legacy of accuracy.

 

[KatrinaCastillo]

Quote

I agree with everything you said.

I'm on board. 

I think my initial reasoning for wanting full box art and cartridge art was nothing more than OCD. But in the grand scheme of things, accuracy deserves more respect. I never put much thought into the fact that 'fake' art is the equivalent of faking history, until I actually had to try to figure out what was real and what was fake on my own.

HyperSpin deserves a legacy of accuracy.

I absolutely agree with you! Often we are overwhelmed by an unquenchable desire for something and it is inexplicable in simple words, but it is just the neural connections in our brain that are raging. I have always been forgiving of fakes because it is a violation of copyright, it is a violation of human rights and it is just awful.