The History of The Cheerful Ghost

Our mascot Spright has taken many forms over the years. Take a bit of time to read about how Spright has changed over the years.

As I was building the intial framework for the site I had a few name ideas but I kept coming back to a dream I had about a happy ghost floating in the sunlight. It was an interesting dream because the ghost seemed content to be dead. Since I didn't have much money to work with an artist I decided to start drawing some concepts for the Ghost. Eventually I decided to name the site Cheerful Ghost and created a very rough sketch that became the basis for Spright, the Cheerful Ghost.

Initial Sticky Note Sketches

An early rough sketch of a couple Ghosts on a sticky note. Very glad the bottom drawings got the axe early on. You can see the early outline of the Cheerful Ghost we launched with.

Plain White Paper Ghosts

A couple of sheets of plain white paper I used to experiment with the body type of the Ghost. Early on I favored short and squat designs. We may come back to this in some later incarnation of Spright as I really like the more round Ghost design.

To Hug Or Not To Hug?

I wanted it to be obvious Spright wants to give you a hug. Very cheesy but I wanted to subtly(or not subtly) convey the open and good natured aspect of what I want the site to be. Putting the creases on the Ghosts arms convey the hug but I dropped it in the final designs for simplicity.

So Many Ghosts

I love the huge Ghost design at the bottom. Makes me think that there is a Ghost world somewhere with Ghosts of all sizes and shapes having a good time.

Attack Of The Flat Heads

The flat head Ghosts at the top made it to the final round. The overall short and squat design dropped them out of the final design because I wanted something that could work as a square design.

The Original Spright

After many iterations on the Ghost design I boiled it down to a few and decided on an image that I felt took the best parts of the Ghosts. I wanted a uniform Ghost that worked in a square aspect and could work as a small and large size on the web(thus the thick black lines). I liked quite a few of my drawings but didn't know how to transfer them to a good quality image. The best idea I had was to scan the image and clean it up in a photo editor. The final Ghost I came to was the best I could do as a absolute NON artist. Looking at it now I should have begged a friend to help me out. The original Spright casts a shadow which was a refrence to the dream I had that it came from.

The Fan Recreation Of My Original

A year into the launch of the site one of our users Tungsten approached me with some new Spright designs. He had an interesting take on Spright and I talked to him about reinterpreting my drawing to fix some of its major flaws. After some back and forth he came up with the amazing vector art we ran with for many years. It improves on my original by adding some shadowing and cleaning up the obvious janky hand drawn look.

Tungstens 8-bit Spright

Tungsten also created a very cool 8-bit Spright that I love. I can't lie, I am a sucker for pixel art. This design was the inspiration for the fridge magnets my partner and I made later.

Ghost Needs Swag Badly

As the site marched on I decided we needed to create some swag to put our branding in peoples hands. I worked with a local artist to put the Ghost on a sticker and poker chip. A popular staple amongst the retro gaming crowd are pearler bead designs of old retro games. I reached out to a local retro pearler bead company and asked them to interpret the 8-bit Ghost as a pearler bead fridge magnet. My partner and I spend many hours hot gluing the fridge magnets together. Later I took all three swag items and packaged it up as The Cheerful Ghost pack. We gave away the packs to users that got Memberships for that year.

The Army of Fridge Magnets

We created a ton of fridge magnets. As part of the assembly process I put all the Sprights on the fridge and if they stayed put for two weeks they were ready to ship.

The Happiest Throw Pillow In The World

My friend Marissa created this amazing Cheerful Ghost throw pillow as a present for Christmas. It's staring at me right now on my shelf. I wasn't sure if people would be interested in buying these so for now I have the only one.

Spright Shows Up In Minecraft

I think you arrive when your stuff put into Minecraft. One of our users Autumncat created this in one of her Minecraft worlds.

Spright Shows Up In Terraria

In one of our community Terraria servers someone mined out Spright. Our early Terraria servers are some of the most fun i've ever had in gaming and seeing Spright added to it made it even cooler.

A New Spright For a Modern Age

A local game artist Hagen DeLoss approached me about creating a new Cheerful Ghost sticker. I loved the idea and after a few rounds we came up with a new interpretation of Spright.

The Greatest Sticker That Ever Stuck

Spright looks amazing as a new sticker and I love the way it turned out. I wrote more about this so check the links below for me talking in detail about the process we took to get this amazing new look.

YouTube Channel Art

John Ingalls (or Scrypt on the site and Roundtable) created this awesome YouTube channel art. It really captures some fun gaming history as well as good natured Roundtable discussions we have each month on the show.

1UP Cards!

Worked with 1UP to create some incredible Cheerful Ghost branded cleaning cards!

Spright has gone through some major changes over the years and as it continues to evolve I'll add that information here. Below are a few links talking about things mentioned above and at times in greater detail.