I really hope people like this Elimination Chamber 2012 DVD you can click the image below to see a preview or CLICK HERE to download!

My cover making started in the fall of 2004 into early 2005. The computer I had during 2004 was a old & slow computer with Windows 98, so I didn’t bother with cover making then, besides I spent to much time then playing video games and doing other things than spending time on the computer. Then in late December I got a brand new Windows XP computer, not sure about the specs but at the time it was a powerful $1100 computer and brand new for December 2004. And yes I still have the same computer laying around, only in parts LOL. As it broke down and had to be replaced a year later, the XP computer after that I do still have, and yeah it works. But I do still have the computer before the one I bought in 2004, it works and still has Windows 98 on it. And when this first Xp of mine did crash & burn yeah I did lost some content I had saved on the computer, but thankfully most was saved on disc at the time.

Back to the story. So when I was a kid, I was into wrestling of course, and loved watching VHS tapes, I’d spend plenty of time at different video rental stores just browsing & finding what I could to rent, picking up wrestling tapes most of the time. But I always liked looking at the covers of the VHS tapes, and not just wrestling, during the late 80s and early 90s like the NES video game covers, most VHS tapes had some amazing art work for covers, hence why you can find so many websites devoted to collectors of VHS tapes, or the VHS scans you find online, just like with movie posters and others, for me I was into wrestling VHS covers. Maybe only because back then, you go look at tapes, pick one up and thats that, it was maybe 5 minutes to 25 minutes a day or a couple times a week you could spend in a video store, back then it was impossible to find WWF tapes for sale, and new WWF vhs tapes back then cost up to $60 so its not like how today you go and buy a DVD for $5-$15 take it home look at the thing any time you want. And you didn’t have the internet back then to see it. So thats kind of the reason I’ve liked covers so much, just a part of my childhood that turned into a hobby of designing them now.

Back then photoshop wasn’t what it is now, Paint Shop Pro was pretty popular then, once I got that, and man was I ever a noob with Paint Shop, this is a time when there wasn’t 78923892 tutorial sites to use, and you didn’t have youtube with 94758934 tutorial videos to watch, besides still a time when most people were on dial up internet like my self, and I hadn’t yet found any wrestling cover sites like the WCF that was still in its early days its self, that I wouldn’t join for another 3+ years in 2008. And I didn’t know a single person at the time who did anything with graphics. It would of been very easy to of said fuck it and give up. But I didn’t. I was having fun, and could see some progress that I made.

With that came what I’m going to call my first ever finished WWF DVD cover, I know for a fact if this isn’t my first ever cover its one of my first few, no clue as to why I made this one other then at the time I had the King of the Ring 1991 hand held video and wanted to make a cover for it, at that time I was just getting into tape trading too. Besides all that at this time I had no idea about scanning and descreening, cropping, resizing ect.. that makes scanned images look better, also had no clue as to how you cut out a image, besides using the eraser free hand.

The preview is a small preview rather than the large ones you get with all my current work, its just to hide how bad the cover really looks lol. Take it for what its worth with this cover, I had no idea about backgrounds or a damn thing, hence the weird KOTR logo used as the background, notice there is no template no dvd or vhs info on the back, the front even lacks all the little things you find on covers now like the dvd logo, the WWF logo thats horrible stretched, the bracket part on the back was I think cut out of something after it was scanned, I couldn’t even make that up back then. I gotta admit many times its past my mind to recreate this cover now exactly how it looks and then recreate it to how I wished it looked and see how good I can make it in comparison. Funny thing I remember making this cover like it was yesterday.

Next up is what I’ll call my “2nd ever custom cover” designed in January 2005.

The easy part to tell this is from January 2005 is from the boxes used for the matches on the back, those boxes were used for the 2005 Royal Rumble on the wwe.com site. I didn’t care for the 05 Rumble, and I did make a cover for it, but it wasn’t so much custom like this one. Bad as this cover looks it took some time to make up, all the images shown on the bottom of the front all had to be cut out, most all of them come from the Survivor Series 1990 studio shots from the WWF magazine, the scans were horrid and the cuts are just as bad lol. Least for the most part the color and size of each wrestler isn’t totally screwed up. Plus it has its coolness factor of showing all those wrestlers on the front. lol The back on the other hand, what was I thinking, just looks terrible. And the logo, my god the logo. To imagine about 6 years after this covers made I’m close to being able to recreate the real Royal Rumble logo used for this event, along with the Wrestlemania logo that I been working on, or the different WWF logos I recently made, just really cool to see how far I’ve come.

Next is the one called my 3rd custom cover ever made -

This was my 2nd version of the Royal Rumble cover, made well after the one above it was. And you can see the small amount of improvement I had made, to say the least the back on this one looks way the hell better then that ugly blue one above it. This was more of a cut and paste job, but still all custom I guess lol. I still laugh at that brick wall of a background, and how the images take up all the back. Least the front looks nice though.

Next is the 4th custom cover -

This one maybe shows some signs of improvement or regression I dunno lol. I can say that with all the cuts I did for these covers, I did these the hard way. Most people are lucky enough to have all the content they need already cut and ready to go, for me back then it was all cut my self, and wasn’t much fun having no clue what I was doing, and with all the time spent they still looked horrid. lol. As for this cover the idea with it, the back was designed to look like the Royal Rumble cover from 1990 that all turned into a ugly clusterfuck mess lol. The flag background and flags background just look bad.

And for the fun part, compare it to my favorite cover, my Wrestlemania 7 custom cover I made almost 3 years ago which was finished on March 11th 2009.

This was maybe a full 4 years from my first Wrestlemania 7 cover to the recent one of 2009, and you can see the original post for the Wrestlemania 7 cover Here  back in 2009 I put a ton of effort into the Wrestlemania 7 cover as I wanted to go all out with it. But you can see just how big the improvement is over 4 years time, and the big difference with these covers, is just the little details on my 2009 version, its still today in a very high quality compared and easily hangs with anything I still make now in quality, the cover really doesn’t miss a beat in quality, something I make sure to be on top of with all my covers, no matter how simple or complex they get, quality comes first.

And last up is the first VHS tape I had made into a custom VHS cover. Granted there isn’t a whole lot custom wise with this, and I never did do many VHS covers after this one, but its just to show what I did, still back in 2005 its the VHS cover from Royal Rumble 1990

And it just so happens one of the first custom covers I made in the WCF was a 2008 version of this exact cover. I’ll save the story of my first WCF covers for another time in another topic, so this doesn’t drag on to long.

Next up is the original cover to the one above. This was made about 3 years ago, so compared to anything I’ve done lately it shows its age all over the place. When I originally made this cover, I was so iffy on it not knowing if anyone would like it or if I even liked it, that I never did release the full cover. It was back then only shown on my blog, and later it made its way to the WCF forum, but still never gave away the full cover. Weird how I managed to hang on to it this long. Its a cover I put a lot of time into back then, between coming up with the idea and putting together all the resources, I forget exactly when I made it, would like to say it was done following my Wrestlemania 9 cover, or could of been before that. But its all original and untouched in this version.

And here is the overall latest version made. This version has already been released here and on the WCF forums, it uses the original logo from the cover above and some of the same images are the same as well, all ideas were taken from the cover above. Since the first version was done so long ago, I’m not sure if I had the idea for this but I do know its been in my mind for a while for a cover like this. I didn’t have all the best resources for this cover, but I liked how it turned out, totally original for sure.

CLICK HERE to download all 3 covers together in one rar. file.

survivor series 87 poster

Next up is a very rare and hard to find original Summerslam 1991 Tshirt from the live event.

summerslam 91 shirt rare

Here we have a very Rare Survivor Series hat. You wont find this on ebay that many times thats for sure, I admit I wouldn’t even buy this at the event back then, but just for the idea of it, the hat does look pretty cool and its a different spin on it with the full red background and the simple Survivor Series logo.

survivor series hat

I have no real idea how rare this vhs tape for Hacksaw Jim Duggan is, all I know is in all the years I’ve searched wrestling tapes on ebay I’ve never seen this one before ever, and all the years from the 80s and 90s that I rented wrestling tapes from places that had every major WWF tape, I still never seen this tape. I don’t know the year of it, I’m guessing by the look of Duggan and with the American flag it might of been released in late 1989 or very early 1990 because its in the small box with the style of cover done for Royal Rumble 89′ and from Royal Rumble 1990 they had mostly moved on to the big boxes. Needless to say this is a rare find for me, if no one else.

Hacksaw Jim Duggan VHS

Next is this very rare and original Wrestlemania 3 shirt , I’ve seen others for this event, but not this red version with the simple style logo, I’m thinking maybe they had different color shirts for the event, I have no idea. Its a cool shirt needless to say, also add that while I’m working on my Wrestlemania logos I’ll hopefully throw in a version of the logo like this one.

Wrestlemania 3 shirt

And up last is this very rare WCW card game, I never seen or heard of it before, doubt I’ll ever play it due to the fact I’m sure it doesn’t sell cheap on ebay, wouldn’t mind having the cards though just to see whats what.

wcw card game

Going to add that you should expect another rare finds topic coming this week, yeah its been about once a month that I post these rare finds topics, but I will have another one posted in a couple of days, as I have tons of very cool and rare finds to show.

Also if you missed the first and second rare wrestling finds topics just go here and you can view them http://wrestlingdvdcovers.com/08/rare-wrestling-finds-2/ and here http://wrestlingdvdcovers.com/22/rare-wrestling-finds-1/