Sleek Arcade-Style Logo/Text Effect

1. Document & Background

Get started by making a new document in Photoshop - something sized around 1000 x 600 will be good for this. Fill the background with a dark color/gradient (#2b2e2c & #1a1a1a). Now, just for a little effect, create a new layer and put a few shapes or brushes onto your canvas, using the colors that you used for the gradient. Lower the opacity for this layer to around 20% or something like that.

So now we have a nice home for our text.

2. Text

Alright, now it's time to start the text. Get out the Horizontal Type Tool (this is the normal text tool) and write something onto your canvas, using a relatively large font and a bright, fun color.

The text setup that you can see in the above image:

Font: NeoTech (commercial)
Color: #b0cc00
Size: 182 pt

So, you need to find a nice font! Be sure to stop by Urban Fonts and DaFont in your quest for good, free fonts.

3. Text Style

Time to add some effects to our text! Right-click your text layer in the layer's palette and go into the Blending Options, apply the following layer styles:

After these few layer styles, we get a pretty wicked-looking text style:

Now that was easy! Well, looks like we're almost done already.

4. 3D Shadow

To finish off, we're gonna add a solid drop shadow to the text. You could easily do this with the layer style (Drop Shadow) but it's gonna be the more 3D-style.

Start by selecting your text layer (in the layer's palette), now hold alt and press the down key once, then the right key. Repeating this step will duplicate your text layer and move it down and to the right.

I've written a tutorial on how to do comic-style text, which explains this process pretty well (link).

After you've duplicated enough layers to get a good 3D look, merge them all together (except for the original) and move them underneath the original layer. Now you want to fill the 'shadow' layer with black, you can do this by locking the transparent pixels and filling it with black (again, refer to the other tutorial).

Looks great now, right? Anyway!

5. Finishing Touches

I wanted to give it some finishing touches before I let it go into the world of arcade websites, so if you want to as well, follow this quick step.

I first duplicated the text layer then merged it together with a blank layer (this will merge the layer styles together with the pixels). Now, you can either add a layer mask and use a brush inside of the layer mask, or you can use the eraser tool to erase away a little bit of the text layer. I normally always use a layer mask, so go ahead and add one (layer > layer mask > reveal all).

Now you will need a nice grungy or splatter-like brush to use inside of your layer mask. Take a look on deviantART or Brusheezy for a good brush, once you find one load it into Photoshop and add it to the layer mask so you get something like this:

I think that was a great finishing touch for the logo. Now, we made this image fairly big so we could merge it all together and size it down to whatever size we need later on, for the website, that is.

This is a mockup I did for it, to finish off: