Blog Post 4: Is It Hip To Be Square?

This week’s entry is going to be a little different to those prior. Instead of looking at technology as it was newly developing, we’re going to take a look at something that has, seemingly, been brought back from the 80s: pixel art and its role in modern gaming.

Although it might be surprising at first to see art direction from the 1980s coming back, if you think about it long enough, it makes sense. According to the Entertainment Software Association, “the average gamer is 35 years old” (p. 4). The gamers of the 80s and early 90s are now adults, and many of the most popular games released in arcades and on home consoles during this time frame made heavy use of pixel art. There were few alternatives at the time – as we saw in the previous blog post, 3D graphics were still quite primitive and would be until the mid-to-late 90s.

Figure 1. Dino Run, by PixelJam Games. Notice the outline-free graphics (and thus bright colors) and also the simple shading (PixelJam Games, 2008).

Something you shouldn’t forget when comparing pixel art in modern games with that of 80s home consoles and computers is that our computers today are much less restricted graphically, in many different ways. The computers of yesteryear have to contend with their own hardware – they were restricted to low resolutions, few colors, and sometimes only a few colors in close proximity.

Figure 2. Example of the Commodore VIC-20’s graphical limitations on how many colors can appear in close proximity – notice the color of the dirt around the enemies (Murray, 2017).

On top of that, they had to contend with the monitors and video interfaces of the time, with color bleeding and artifacting a natural result of the then-current composite video connections.

Figure 3. Super Mario World for the SNES, zoomed in. On the left is an image over composite video, and on the right is the same image using a more modern YPbPr interface (HD Retrovision, LLC).

With modern computers, we don’t have to worry about any of these things – we get millions of colors in much higher resolutions now. This new-found ability to create games with 80s-style or 90s-style graphics without truly needing to worry about hardware limitations allows for a graphical style that appears old-fashioned but is, in reality, a blend of old and new.

Figure 4. Super Time Force Ultra. Despite the pixel art graphics, this game's system requirements far eclipse anything available in the 80s or 90s (Capybara Games, 2014).

That's not to say that all games eschew the limited palettes of yesteryear. Some games targetted towards modern platforms adopt graphical limits as a stylistic choice.

Figure 5. Tiny Dangerous Dungeons, an example of a game for modern computers that adopts the resolution and color palette of an original Nintendo Game Boy (Adventure Islands, 2013).

Nostalgia isn't the only factor in favor of a pixel art graphical style, however. Cost is a factor as well; pixel art is relatively quick and inexpensive these days. I would imagine that, for a game developer without an art budget or a particular talent for art, the prospect of picking up a 2D paint program to create pixel art is far less scary than the prospect of picking up a 3D modeling program. Anecdotally, I agree.

It's also quite possible that, as the demographic who grew up with these graphics ages, fewer people will have a sense of nostalgia for pixel art, and fewer people will appreciate it. In other words, pixel art might once again fall to the wayside; only time will tell.

References:

Entertainment Software Association. (2017). “Essential Facts about the Computer and Video Game Industry” [PDF Report]. Retrieved November 30, 2017 from http://www.theesa.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/EF2017_Design_FinalDigital.pdf

PixelJam Games. (April 30, 2008). Dino Run: Escape Extinction! [Video game]. Retrieved November 30, 2017 from http://www.kongregate.com/games/pixeljamgames/dino-run

Murray, D. (Jun 16, 2017). “VIC-20 Overload - Penultimate Cartridge, Pentagorat, & Planet X1” [Screenshot from video file]. Retrieved November 30, 2017 from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c5Fj8SALkbg

HD Retrovision, LLC. (n.d.). “SNES YPbPr Component Cable” [Image from webpage]. Retrieved November 30, 2017 from http://www.hdretrovision.com/snes/

Capybara Games. (August 25, 2014). Super Time Force Ultra [Image from webpage]. Retrieved November 30, 2017 from http://store.steampowered.com/app/250700/Super_Time_Force_Ultra/

Adventure Islands. (November 19, 2013). Tiny Dangerous Dungeons [Video game]. Retrieved November 30, 2017 from http://www.stencyl.com/game/play/22535

Blog Post 3(D): Gaming in Another Dimension

We will move from the introduction of sprites to the introduction of 3D graphics in games with this post. While this seems like a bit of a jump, it’s definitely worth exploring as 3D graphics define many of today's games, with increasingly realistic environments.

One could make an argument that scaling sprites based on their distance to the player and vector-based graphics have made 3D gaming possible for a long time. An example of a game that tried to make early use of 3D-style graphics is Atari’s Battlezone, released in November of 1980 as an arcade cabinet. Battlezone took the vector-based approach, as seen below:

Figure 1. Atari’s Battlezone, released in 1980. An early example of a 3D-style game using wireframe vector graphics (FunCade 64, 2017, 0:11).

However, games with fully-rendered 3D environments – even simple ones – were a bit out of reach for the hardware of the time period. Of course, this didn’t stop anyone from making games that toyed with the concept of a 3D perspective. An early example of this would be 3D Monster Maze, first released for the Sinclair ZX81:

Figure 2. 3D Monster Maze for the Sinclair ZX81, released in 1982. The walls appear 3D, but the T-Rex doesn’t, though it does grow larger as it approaches (Evans, 1981).

3D Monster Maze is one of the earliest examples of a game that takes a “2.5D” perspective. The walls and surroundings take on a 3D appearance scaling as they get “further away,” while enemies and powerups appear as 2D sprites.

A better-known example of a game that takes on a 2.5D perspective is Wolfenstein 3D. The walls were drawn using a ray casting algorithm while the enemies were flat bitmap graphics, scaled based on their distance from the player:

Figure 3. Id Software’s Wolfenstein 3D, released on May 5, 1992. Many of the concepts from 3D Monster Maze are apparent (Id Software, 1992).

This approach of 3D-rendered walls combined with scaled flat enemies persisted in many games for home PCs and video game consoles, such as in 1993’s Doom:

Figure 4. Id Software’s Doom, released on December 10, 1993. The walls and floor are rendered using a better algorithm than Wolfenstein 3D, but the flat and scaled enemies remain (Id Software, 1993).

By now, there were indeed games that used 3D graphics with polygonal players and enemies. A striking example of this is the arcade title Virtua Racing:

Figure 5. Sega’s Virtua Racing, released in 1992; this is the arcade version, though a graphically-reduced version for the Sega Genesis/Mega Drive was also released (VideoGamerJunkie, 2012, 0:57).

If you take a close look, however, you’ll notice that all of the polygons are flat-colored; there aren’t any textures being applied! The early 90s were too early to have games that were both fully-rendered and textured.

By the mid-to-late 90s, Quake had been released on home PCs, and consoles designed with 3D in mind like the Sony PlayStation and Nintendo 64 were mainstream.

Figure 5. Super Mario 64, one of the most popular 3D games of the mid-90s, with 3D NPCs, players, and environments (Nintendo EAD, 1996).

Figure 6. Quake, by Id Software, one of the earlier and more popular fully textured and rendered games (Id Software, 1996).

These more recent examples are much closer to the many 3D games of today, though modern 3D models have far more complicated meshes and textures, thanks to the ever-increasing might of computer hardware.

References

FunCade 64. (2017, March 6). “Battle Zone (Atari 1980) - AAE (Another Arcade Emulator)” [Video file]. Retrieved November 2, 2017 from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w2E8gs6On9Q

Evans, M. (1981) 3D Monster Maze [Image, screenshot]. Retrieved November 2, 2017 from https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/8/83/3D-monster-maze-T-rex-2-steps-away.png

Id Software. (May 5, 1992). Wolfenstein 3D [Image, screenshot]. Retrieved November 2, 2017 from https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/6/69/Wolf3d_pc.png

Id Software. (December 10, 1993). Doom [Image, screenshot]. Retrieved November 2, 2017 from https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/d/de/Doom_ingame_1.png

VideoGamerJunkie. (2012, January 5). “Virtua Racing – Arcade” [Video file]. Retrieved November 2, 2017 from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_zxjAEyT7Ng

Nintendo EAD. (June 23, 1996) Super Mario 64 [Image, screenshot]. Retrieved November 2, 2017 from https://www.mariowiki.com/images/thumb/8/81/SM64BobOmbBattlefield.png/236px-SM64BobOmbBattlefield.png

Id Software. (June 22, 1996). Quake [Image, screenshot]. Retrieved November2, 2017 from http://wiki.quakeworld.nu/images/Quake_1_screenshot_320x200_e1m3.png

Blog Post 2: When Circles Were Invented

Generation 2: the Invention of Circles and the Atari 2600

The second generation of game consoles dawned once console manufacturers started sticking microprocessors into their products; Fairchild stuck one of their own Fairchild F8s into the design of their Channel F, and Atari stuck an MOS 6507 (a cheaper variant of the 6502 found in many home computers of the era) into their Atari 2600, then known as the Atari Video Computer System. This allowed the new consoles do things that the discrete logic designs of their ancestors couldn’t dream of doing – namely, sprite-based animation, richer sound, and more varied games; after all, you can program software for a CPU but really can’t program software for consoles dependent on hard-wired logic.

The Atari 2600 was the most popular and long-lived console of this generation, responsible for one of the biggest booms and one of the biggest busts in the industry’s history, so I’ll focus on it – the other members of this generation didn’t have quite the same impact, but subsequent members did tend to have superior graphical capabilities so I’ll cover them briefly at some point in the future.

One of the hallmarks of this generation was the debut of sprite-based graphics – we can now have recognizable characters and shapes instead of sticking strictly to squares and rectangles – possibly the biggest leap in video game graphics, and, in my opinion, even bigger than the jump from 2D to 3D. The Atari 2600 was capable of drawing five objects at once – two player sprites, two missiles, and one ball. If this sounds limited, that’s because it is.

As everyone at the time was obsessed with bringing the arcade experience home, the inexpensive Atari hardware couldn’t quite measure up to the often vastly-superior arcade cabinet hardware. The 2600 was equipped with only 128 bytes of RAM in total, shared by the video and the program, and its single MOS 6507 processor couldn't quite measure up to arcade cabinets, with their much more expensive, powerful, and sophisticated hardware. Inflaming this issue was Atari itself, which (without going into too much detail about the company itself) often rushed development deadlines. This often ended up resulting in games that were less polished than they could have been, in gameplay and in graphics.

Even with all that going against it, programmers of the 2600 figured out ways around the system’s limitations. Since the 2600 drew its graphics line-by-line, objects were often reused several times horizontally and in duplicate or triplicate in the same line. This created the illusion of many more objects on the screen than the 2600 itself could actually handle.

Figure 1. Space Invaders for the Atari 2600. This shows one way programmers sidestepped the console's limitations (Spice, 2014, p. 75).

One of the most memorable examples of a game that failed to live up to the hype was the 2600’s original port of Pac-Man. The 2600’s limitations and the rushed development cycle resulted in a game that rendered only one ghost per frame – or, in other words, ghosts that only appeared once every four frames, making them look like they were teleporting all over the place. This extreme flickering was one of the most often-criticized parts of the game, in addition to its radical departure from the aesthetics of the arcade original.

Figure 2. An example of the flickery ghosts from the Atari 2600 port of Pac-Man (RickyC, 2007).

Nevertheless, as the console aged, developers figured out how to make more complicated visuals in the limits of the hardware, and cartridges with more ROM space and added RAM became more commonplace. By being clever with scanlines, sprites, and playfields, programmers learned to make games that look much better than some of the system’s earlier titles. The console was tricked into displaying more onscreen colors and more complex backgrounds, and developers found improved ways around in-game flicker and the console's other limitations.

Figure 3. Pitfall! on the Atari 2600, released by Activision. Activision proved themselves quite capable of making nice-looking games. (World of Longplays, 2017).

Figure 4. Solaris, released in 1986; an example of a very good-looking Atari 2600 game (VWestlife, 2012).

None of this stopped the imminent Video Game Crash of 1983, of course, since the market still ended up being saturated with bad games, with the 2600’s E.T being the most infamous of the bunch. The third generation of consoles would reach the USA in October of 1985, when the two-year-old Famicom made its way over to the States as the Nintendo Entertainment System... but that's a topic for another time.

Nowadays, there’s a bustling Atari 2600 homebrew community; if you have ever felt the urge to program your own Atari 2600 games, you could. Here’s a screenshot from a small project I made in batari Basic, an easy-to-use programming language just for the Atari 2600 created by the community:

Figure 5. Demonstration of batari Basic. (Silverman, Z, 2017).

Other people have made homebrew games that really push the boundaries of the console, sometimes written in batari Basic but more often in the console’s native 6502 assembly language. These games showcase what the 2600 is really capable of with a bit of effort.

Figure 6. The most recent version of Pac-Man 8K by DINTAR816, released in 2015 (mikewayda, 2017).

Figure 7. Halo 2600, released in 2010 and developed by a Microsoft employee (TRexSpaceStation, 2016).

Figure 8. Oystron, released in 1997 (TRexSpaceStation, 2016).

It was unfortunate that Atari acted as it did, choosing to rush games out rather than give them the time they really deserved. Ultimately, they would never be able to quite replicate the initial success of the 2600, try as they might.


References

Davie, A. (2003, 20 August). “Season 21: Sprites” [Message 1]. Message posted to http://atariage.com/forums/topic/32481-session-21-sprites/

Spice, D, Jr. (2014, 7 November). Atari 2600 Homebrew [Apple Keynote slides]. Retrieved from https://www.icloud.com/keynote/000A1y-UrO15wtjsogeOnTJlw#2014_HAE

RickyC. (2007, 23 October). “Atari - Pacman” [Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wtv6SE6RnD8

VWestlife. (2012, 20 April). "Atari 2600 Solaris in STEREO! [Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f68IjW7_w98

mikewayda. (2017, 13 April). "Atari 2600 Pacman 8K" [Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PmHob6BFMe0

TRexSpaceStation. (2016, February 10). "Atari 2600 Homebrew games!" [Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fQY9SIti7YU

World of Longplays. (2017, April 20). "Atari 2600 Longplay [004] Pitfall!" [Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l_lJ-ONcMEs

Blog Post 1: The Early Days

Generation 1: Odyssey into the new frontier (warning: graphic content)

I could think of no better place to start a blog about video game graphics than at the very beginning of home video gaming with the first video game console: the Magnavox Odyssey. First released in 1972, the Odyssey was contemporary to Pong.

The original Odyssey didn’t even have its own CPU – the console itself had some hardwired logic, and the game cards were contained traces that configured the Odyssey’s logic in a specific way. The console wasn’t capable of color or sound, and it could only draw lines and rectangles – sprite-based graphics wouldn’t be invented for another few years. The game paddles and balls thus looked very simplistic.

Figure 1. Odyssey, with no overlay. (gameboy3800, 2011, 4:19)

The Odyssey was so graphically and computationally primitive that Magnavox gave it some help. They included overlays for the different games, and gave some of the games scorecards or other pieces like cards, chips, and dice that assisted gameplay in some of the games; the Odyssey couldn’t enforce the rules for any of the games, after all, partially since some of the game cards were used in several games. Some of the games had more to look at off the screen than on it!

Figure 2. Odyssey Tennis, with the included overlay. (gameboy3800, 2011, 4:19)

Considering the console itself could only draw white rectangles, the games written for the Odyssey were often really ambitious, even though they required the players to keep score and enforce the rules. Many of the Odyssey games would feel like board games with a video element today, but back in the early 70s, this was the extent of the home console market. There would be a number of later “dedicated” consoles with no interchangeable media in the same generation, some of which had color capabilities, but they still looked quite primitive, with no sprites yet.

Figure 3. Screenshot of a game from the Nintendo Color TV Game 6.

If you want to try out the Odyssey yourself in all of its blocky glory, the best option I’ve seen is Sly DC’s Odysim over at http://odysim.blogspot.com/ . It goes a bit above and beyond what the Odyssey itself did by optionally putting the overlays over the game for you and simulating the originally-included game pieces.

All in all, this first generation of video game consoles are not much to look at, graphically speaking - understandable, given the technological limits. There's a lot more to see in the next generation - the first with microprocessors and sprites!

References

Waddell, A, and Winter, D. (n.d). “Magnavox Odyssey.” OLD-COMPUTERS.COM : The Museum, www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?c=883

gameboy3800. (2011, 24 January). Magnavox Odyssey review [Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uY6OaEmVuP8

[Screenshot of a game from the Nintendo Color TV Game 6]. Retrieved September 27, 2017 from https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Nintendo_Color_TV_Game_6_Screenshot.png