Time to wrap things up the way some classic games used to do: with a Boss Rush Mode!

Custom Sprites: new sprites (and new galleries) include…
– Double Dragon: Willy (all-new, better than that last one I made)
– Streets of Rage: Shiva (classic design)
– Strider: improved Ton Pooh (and sisters) sprites (especially the head) + 2 new sprites: pose based on a Strider bosses pic and a sprite in her NxC fight stance.
– Zelda series: Gannon (Link to the Past design).

That new arcade background, with quite a few machines that haven’t been in a background until, was made thanks to everyone who voted here (thanks, Eddie Mountaingoat), Twitter, and Instagram! Oddly enough, the 6-player X-Men and Alien vs. Predator machines were in that 2020 teaser preview, but this poll isn’t the reason why. I’ll have more arcade background news in the not-too-distant-future. It has been added to the Group, Vs., and MvC ending screen styles in the main image generator.

That’s all for the 20th anniversary updates, and I hope you’ve had fun checking them out, watching the videos, and playing with the new sprites in the generators. This would’ve been on single update, but offline hassles sidelined me for over a week, so I’ve been using the extended posts to make more content for you. It wasn’t easy to hustle and get these extra things done, but if you had fun, it was all worth it. For everyone who was there since the early Angelfire-hosted days, for those who just found this mess of a site, and everyone in between, thanks for visiting!

My original plan was to post yesterday’s sprites together with these two clip compilations today, but I just felt like splitting them up. These clips in each compilation were different reasons, including early promo vids, for learning how to use Anime Studio (now Moho), and for the upcoming Superhero Sprite Showcade or Comic Book Showcade (I’m still undecided on that right now).

The Marvel video is a mix of official Capcom sprites with my fan pixel work with a sprinkle of Data East’s Avengers game with the second Onslaught BGM from Marvel vs. Capcom as background music. The DC vid is all my work, including unfinished music I’m working specifically for the Showcade videos. Please forgive any sound issues, I’m currently using some cheap temporary speakers, so I couldn’t fine tune the audio before uploading.

Also: a gallery of custom portraits for Capcom’s X-Men: Children of the Atom is now up, with an improved Deadpool portrait and a newly converted Batman portrait, both with art by Jim Lee (like most of the portrait art is in that game).

Those portraits are also in the GFX Generator so you can make your own fake screenshots with them!

The Anniversary celebration finally wraps up tomorrow!

Comic book characters have had a heavy presence on this site since the early days, so today’s spotlight falls on superhero characters from Marvel and DC Comics. Back when I started the site, anyone who wasn’t Batman, the X-Men, or Spider-Man was considered an obscure character (sometimes by their own companies), but that didn’t stop me from making sprite edits of Green Lantern Hal Jordan (who was still dead and buried both in the literal AND wrestling sense of the word), Black Widow, and Taskmaster. Now I’m spriting everything from scratch, replacing all the edits I made from Capcom sprites while trying to add characters I’ve never sprited before, and this update is a combination of that!

Custom Sprites: new sprites (and new galleries) include…
– DC Comics: all-new scratch-made sprites of the Atom, Firestorm, Power Girl, Steel
– Superman (Taito): the unknown female character found in the game’s rom (something I found using Turaco and posted on the site back in the early ’00s) and the basic drones.
– Marvel Comics: the Blob, Pryo, Sentinel (all three based on their Konami beat ’em up/Pryde of the X-Men pilot appearances), Spider-Man (improved scratch-made sprite in “Spider-Man the Arcade Game” pose), Mysterio, the Green Goblin

Mini-logos
– DC Comics: Firestorm, Steel
– Marvel Comics: the Blob, Mysterio, Pyro

All newness was added to the GFX Image Generators, where you can make pics like the ones at the top of this news post!

I planned to skip a day and post these sprites and something else on Tuesday, but I just wait. Is there still something coming this Tuesday? Of course, and if you didn’t get enough comic book content today, come back tomorrow for some video fun!

Today is the 20th anniversary of the original ScrollBoss website. Starting on Tripod with a template and some miscolored PC screenshots and sprites from a Sega compilation, this site started as a place for me to talk about old action video games, especially the ones that didn’t have much presence on the internet back in the year 2000. It eventually grew into a place for me to do the same thing but now I’m making most of the sprites that I’m adding to the site, and I never would’ve believed it if you’d told me that decades ago.

This hasn’t been the easiest year for most of us, and the last few weeks have been really irritating for me, but working on this site and seeing your reactions to the pixel art has done what it’s always done for me, help pull me through some tough times. Thank you for that and I hope this place can do the same for you, even if it’s just for a few moments of browsing the galleries and messing with the image generators. There will be multiple updates throughout the week, along with some visitor participation moments (more on that in a bit), so stay tuned!

Custom Sprites: new sprites (and new galleries) include…
– Bionic Commando (NEW separate gallery): Radd Spencer (NES design) in MvC3/MvCI fight stance
– Double Dragon: Billy and Jimmy Lee (DD Advance fight stance)
– Dragon’s Crown(NEW separate gallery): Elf, Wizard
– the Legend of Kage: Kage
– Metroid: Zero Suit Samus
– Rushing Beat: Kazan (Brawl Brothers/Rushing Beat Ran select screen pose)
– Streets of Rage: Cherry Hunter
– Sunset Riders (NEW!): FINALLY, right? Standard gunfight stance remakes for all four heroes kick off the new gallery.
– NuChallenger: : Brad Steel (completing the hero team from Treachery in Beatdown City)

All newness has been added to the GFX Generators where you can make your own graphics like the examples up there!

The print company I work through, Perfect Posters, reopened a while ago, so prints are once again available for sale in the shop! Also, I’ve set up a page on RedBubble with some original pixel art available mostly as stickers, but it’s on a few other products, too.

Later this week, I’ll put together a special arcade background for the image generator based on YOUR votes. The Twitter post is here and the Instagram post is here, but I’ll repeat the set-up here. Leave a reply with up to seven games you’d like to see based on this list. NOTE: if you choose “Capcom Big Blue (Capcom’s late 80s to late 90s arcade games that worked on the CPS or CPS2 system)” or “Neo Geo”, please mention WHICH games for that you want (“Capcom Big Blue – Captain Commando” or “Neo Geo Metal Slug 2 and Samurai Shodown”). Here’s the list (click to see the full sized version):

I’d noticed some issues in the image generators while working on May 22nd’s Pac-Man Anniversary update and started working on a few the next day. That led to working on a few random things and this is the result.

Custom Portraits – there are now two separate galleries for the custom portraits I’ve made/converted, with credits for as many things as I could find for the converted official art.
– Street Fighter Alpha/Zero 3: same as the portraits page, but with an improved Billy Lee (Double Dragon)
– Marvel Super Heroes – Capcom: finally, all the custom MSH-style portraits seen in the site’s image generators are in a gallery. The X-men CotA portraits will get a gallery soon.

A gallery for the X-Men: Children of the Atom custom portraits will be added soon.

Mini-logos:
– Capcom: Rose (Street Fighter), Bishamon (Darkstalkers), Felicia (Darkstalkers)
– Nintendo: Pokémon (redone), Pikachu (“Hey you, Pikachu” style)

BTW: Feel free to use these custom portraits and minilgos in your fan projects, just give me a credit somewhere.

These things were added to the graphics generators. Additional fixes include:
– Marvel Super Heroes: fixes to the character list (originally copied from the SFA3 Vs. lists and using old temporary versions of characters made when I re-wrote the generator scripts).
– Fixed Firebrand’s Darkstalkers 3 portrait, made MSH vs versions of Arthur and Firebrand’s custom portraits.