By Steve Fulton

A few weeks ago I wrote an article about my efforts as complete “non-artist” to create funny, classic video game inspired photo-shopped images for Cracked.com “Photoplasty” weekly contests.   The gist of the story was that, even though cracked.com never features any of my images, the effort on my part to push my myself to “be creative” was still rewarding.  Afterwards,I quit making the images because it was taking too much of my time.

Well, last week when I saw they had posted a contest theme named “Video Game Plot Twists That Would Have Blown Your Mind” ,I decided to try again using a  “lessons learned” approach.  So instead of making images that feature games that are my favorites, I decided to instead, use games that Cracked.com seems to fall back upon when choosing images.  I threw out my standbys of Pitfall!, Asteroids, and  Food Fight, etc., I decided to pick from games that I see often used in these contests like Space Invaders, Frogger, Paperboy, Metroid, and Super Mario.  At the same time, I decided to create an animated .gif instead of still image, because those types of images seem to get chosen more often.

Anyway, of the three entries I created, Cracked.com chose my Space Invaders image as #16 for the week.   The image was inspired by the pilot episode of the The Twilight Zone.  To be honest, I don’t even think the image is that funny.  I think they chose it because it did not look like any of the others.

So what did I learn form this?  I suppose the lesson is “know your audience”, or “keep trying”  or something like that.   Or maybe there is no lesson to be learned at all.  I’m still trying to decide.