The ‘Backlit TMNT 30th Anniversary NES’

Presenting the ‘Backlit TMNT 30th Anniversary NES’! Literally a one-of-a-kind custom NES art piece. There is only ONE in the world, and I made a promise to keep it that way.

Weeks of planning, over 500 messages, 150+ man hours of labor, countless mockups and revisions, working all hours of the day and night, and a lot of love went into this tribute that honors the original black and white TMNT comic books.

This particular art piece has received something quite unique – I’m incredibly honored that a number of TMNT celebrities have autographed it! Judith Hoag (aka April O’Neil from the original 1990 TMNT film), Kenn Scott (the main suit performer for Raphael in TMNT II: The Secret of the Ooze, and both the stunt suit double for Raphael and one of the Foot Clan soldiers in the original TMNT movie), and Richard Usher of the band Partners in Kryme (famous for their song “Turtle Power” from the 1990 TMNT film soundtrack). Even Andre Meadows (of Black Nerd Comedy) has signed it too! The owner of this one-of-a-kind art piece, Jared Guynes, has told me that he will eventually get Kevin Eastman‘s autograph on it as well!

This system is by far the most intricate and laborious art piece I have ever created to this date. It is the grand culmination of my skills over the past 7 years of creating video game related art pieces. We pushed ourselves and our tools to the limit, but we succeeded in what we set out to do – create a one-of-a-kind piece of art that honors the heroes in a half shell.

The cut out design was all done by hand! Using extreme care not to accidentally break any of the tiny pieces, I worked for days to finely sand the edges by hand after it was rough cut out.

The backlit design in this particular system is actually a brand new prototype! Using a secret combination of materials and methods that I have developed over the years, it produces a rich color fully backlit design that works well with the 8 bit pixel art.

Like many of my NES art pieces, I teamed up with the legendary Custom NES Guy to bring this to reality. You’ll see that he and I collaborate a lot, and with good reason – he’s one of the very best at what he does in the entire world. The paint is all professional automotive base coat clear coat system. Custom mixed colors with metallic added. All defects from the original 1985 molding process were block sanded out, all rough texture was sanded smooth, all scratches/gouges carefully inspected and sanded smooth, original bottom labels carefully preserved. The clear coat was color sanded and buffed just like you would do on a show car! Estimated 17 hours of work just for the painting, sanding, and buffing (that had to be done by hand).

The system even has custom Audio/Video port decals that match the color palette.

The icing on the cake is four controllers, each with the custom avatar of one of the turtles.

In the end, I hope that TMNT fans appreciate the weeks worth of work that went into this system and enjoy this truly one-of-a-kind design!