Was that playfield digitally printed or screen printed? If it was screen printed, it's very possible that the vector artwork WAS an exact copy of the original Bally playfield artwork with its finer, crisper lines and details, and that the ink spread when printed. If these were halftones, the effect would be called "dot gain", where, for example, halftone dots that are supposed to represent a 40% tint spread during printing and now might be 50% or more, causing the shade to darken. The linework all looks the same in your sample pics, just much thicker on the reprint, so it's not like different artwork was used. Even the dots in the red on her shirt and reflections on her nails are smaller, which means the red ink spread also.

I wonder if their sample playfield that they created the artwork from had some sort of ink spread, and they just copied exactly what that looked like. My repro Sorcerer backglass (NOT from CPR but from PP) was like that. The original had much finer and intricate details, and I was kinda disappointed with the thicker black outlines and loss of detail of the reproduction. Turns out that their sample was exactly like that, and even the backglass photo on the Sorcerer flyer shows the thicker lines.

Gotta disagree with you, if you're referring to the Adobe Illustrator's and other tracing programs. I used Adobe Streamline in the 90's and various online tracing websites later on, and currently use Illustrator's tracing feature on a daily basis. Tracing might merge some things only if they're practically abutting each other, but those extremely thin lines and dots, like the shadings in Dolly's neck for example, would likely be ignored entirely and omitted from the final vector, not thickened like that. Here's a jpeg export of a quick trace I just did of Dolly's hand & mike pic above. The linework looks like shit because the image was low-res and no cleanup done to it, but you can see the nothing was thickened, except perhaps minimally due to the messy linework. This looks nothing like the thick black lines in rockwell's CPR sample pic.

What may be possible is this, though - the original playfield scan may have had the colors knocked out of it in Photoshop, leaving a black and white only design, and then using a little blurring and contrasting, or adding a stroke to the outlines, or any of several other methods, all the edges of the black were thickened slightly to give the black a little more "bulk", and then that was vectorized. But the tracing itself wouldn't thicken anything up on its own, it would only result in very messy and uneven curved lines unless the black and white image was super-high resolution and had sharply defined edges.

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