"The Rascal" saves the day !

I'm doing a painting for my friend Jenni. It's going to be another of my 'pop-art' video game ones - this time based on the classic coin-op arcade game Bubble Bobble. If you've never played the game you've really missed out - it was a classic. You controlled a very cute little dragon-thing, and instead of breathing fire, you breathed out ... well ... bubbles. Maybe they knocked back a bottle of dish-wash liquid or something. Anyway - you ensnared these other kinda cute monsters in the bubbles, and while they were trapped inside you had to jump on them and pop them - the monsters then turned into fruit which you ate for more points ...

There really was a great deal of LSD around in the 80's, huh ?

Anyway - I thought that the little monsters would make a good painting. I talked with Jenni about the kind of canvas we could do. Either a square shaped one, which would have a 3x3 grid - having one dragon and all of the main monsters. OR - we could go with a rectangle, which would give me a 3x4 grid, with BOTH of the dragons, all the monsters AND Baron Von Blubba ! The white 'death-whale' thing that comes to eat you if you take too long to clear a stage.

The rectangle seemed the way to go !

However - when I started tracing the monster pixel designs onto the grids ( I had to rule up 12 freaking 18x18 square grids ! Yeesh - that took forever ! ), I discovered I had made a fatal error ! There were only 8 main monsters from the game ! Even with the good Baron AND both Bob and Bub ( the two dragons ) there were only 11 spaces accounted for ! Feck !

Lucky for me I had the trusty internet ! Turns out there WAS one more monster hidden in the game. I had never seen it before - but apparantly he does exist. He was called 'The Rascal' - and he turned up and killed you when you hung around in the hidden treasure rooms too long. He does kinda look like a gherkin with a face and isn't as 'cute' as some of the others - but I guess it is a more true and complete representation of the characters from the game.