Is Wario Land the First Hand-Drawn 2D Console Title?
Jul. 19
So I mentioned way back in the Wario Land comments that I eventually got to play it at Nintendo's booth. I got to do the first level, which is sort of the tutorial level, but with no irritating text to slow you down.
The first thing I noticed while playing is that the controls were impeccable. The second thing I noticed was that Wario moved way, way too smoothly to be a pixel art creation (like, say, the guys in Mega Man 9). He looked, frankly, like a hand-drawn cartoon character. I asked Nintendo's rep to confirm this or me, and they did-- Wario and all of his enemies had their movements digitally animated by hand, then imported into the game. Backgrounds appear to be a blend of digital art and pixel art.
They couldn't name the studio, but got back to me with it late last night-- and it seems Wario was digitally animated by Production I.G., a Japanese studio known for anime projects ranging from Ghost in the Shell to the famous anime sequence in Kill Bill. Does this make Wario Land a historic first? I can't think of any other game, offhand, that managed 2D without using pixel art for moving objects. If you can, please hit the comments.
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Comments
Hmmm. What about Odin Sphere? I'm not entirely sure but it's the only thing that comes to mind. But I dunno if it'd fit or not.
... ok, with that out of the way I've got to espouse about Wario Land: Shake It again. Holy crap, it animates like awesome. My mind is still blown and it's been awhile since I first seen it. Major major kudos for what these people are doing.
Wow, I had no idea that no other 2D game had its movements hand drawn! That should certainly make the game interesting, and I might pick it up when it comes out.
Odin Sphere looked like pixel art to me, but did use a lot of Flash-like manipulations to artificially up its frame rate. I would basically need to know more about Vanillaware's production to call it either way.
That what I thought when I saw Wario Land, but here it comes from I.G. is awsome!
I am just the happiest person in the universe about the Wario animations. I never thought I'd use the word "pretty" in the same sentence as "Wario" (unless it was "pretty ugly" or something like that), but this game just looks so stunning.
Might I direct you folks towards Alien Hominid? It has some pretty sweet hand-drawn graphics and hilarious gameplay. And yes, I am talking about a console version, not just the online game.
But you already know that Alien Hominid has it's feet shoved directly in Flash roots.
Wario Land Shake It is... it's... man, I dunno how to describe it. It's just glorious. That animation in a game is just craziness. I wanna make a shrine to it and I *don't know why*.
You said "noticed was that Mario moved" Isn't it Wario?
That's pretty cool.. I know the characters in the Genesis Mickey game "Mickey Mania" were drawn by Disney animators..
Hah, I did typo. I shall correct. =)
I'll go take a look at Alien Hominid when I have . Even if it has roots in Flash, that doesn't necessarily mean it wasn't traditionally animated.
I'm also going to look into Genesis Mickey, since I recall that was an influential game, though I also recall it using pixel art. Granted, they could have turned traditional animation into pixel art fairly easy back then, I think.
While the original was done in flash, that doesn't stop it from being animated. Also, Behemoth is coming out with castle crashers, which I watched being animated. Looking at the Wario is doing, I can say for sure, the infuence is definitely Alien Hominid.
After watching some Alien Hominid vids, that game was definitely using digital animations as in-game objects, so it does beat Wario to the punch. That said, I'm not sure it influences Wario Land in any particular way.
Besides the huge gap between Alien Hominid and Wario Land, I can find no evidence Behemoth's game was ever released in Japan for anybody over there to buy or play (let alone be influenced by). I wonder if this is basically two different groups having the same general idea at different times... one that other people tried, as well.
I also looked at footage of the Mickey Mouse game mentioned above, and those animations were really clearly hand-drawn before being turned into sprites. Mickey's movements have about a billion more frames to them than anything else he interacts with onscreen.
That game was distributed in all three major gaming territories, so the impulse for doing this sort of thing predates the ability of technology to implement it for all in-game objects. I'm starting to think we'd see the technique used a lot more often if not for the irrational preference or 3D over 2D visuals that's dominated gaming for the past ten years or so.
Yeah, there's nothing about the idea of animated sprites that makes me think that it is an idea that only one person in the world could have, and everyone else would have to ape. I mean, it seems like it would just be the natural progression of things if you wanted to work in 2D... I'm pretty sure there were some adventure games that also used digital animation but I can't think of them offhand.
Actually I want to say that Monkey Island 3 did but they may have actually been pixelated and my young mind was just parsing them as cartoons.
Technically, if you want the first video game to have hand-drawn animations it would be the original Prince of Persia. A human actor was drawn going through the appropriate motions, then the frames of film were approximately traced and the Prince drawn in the pose of each frame. The Prince images were adapted into the frames of his sprite's animation.
Beats me if it counts. Still, Prince of Persia's movements looked a lot better than anything that came for years thereafter, and I'm glad that kind of technique is being discovered again.
That sounds more like rotoscoping than what I'd consider to be proper hand-drawn animation.
Yeah, that's rotoscoping to pixel art. Which is actually a forerunner to the mo-cap techniques used extensively in developing 3D animations these days.
I'm not sure I understand the distinction here between "hand-drawn" and "pixel art." I mean, I would assume most pixel art was drawn by hand after the days of pure math-based graphics like the Vectrex or Pong, and before photo/CG digitization a la Mortal Kombat and Donkey Kong Country became all the rage. I mean, sure they were built out of square sprites, but they had to draw the information in those sprites at some point.
Or is it the animation itself? In that case, I don't think Odin Sphere would count, since it uses jointed animation like Symphony of the Night (and most flashtoons). Of course, again the old sprite-based animation would have more in common with traditional cel- film animation than computer-assisted jointed animation, since each frame was drawn and put into sequence individually--there were just usually far fewer of them.
That's not to mention there are plenty of old games that used actual honest-to-goodness hand-drawn, cel animation like Curse of Monkey Island, Kings Quest VII, Dragon's Lair, Space Ace, etc... Just because the edges were jaggier before HD doesn't mean the art wasn't drawn by hand.
Am I missing something here because I haven't seen it in motion?
Hibb,
Yeah, I think stuff like Curse of Monkey Island and King's Quest VII would count. I knew there were some adventure games I was forgetting. But looking back up at the OP it's worth noting that it does specify console titles, which lagged far behind the PC in terms of capability before making the immediate switchover to CGI. So it's sort of like most console games just skipped a step.
In the case of Wario I think the difference is that it was outsourced to an actual animation company, most likely storyboarded, and frames were drawn directly onto the computer in digital ink without any pixel conversion whatsoever. It's also worth noting that unlike Dragon's Lair, the animations aren't predrawn cutscenes but actually repeating gameplay animations such as running and jumping. It really is amazing to see in motion and I hope we can get some gameplay footage up here when it becomes available.
I confess that I don't 100% know the process for creating pixel art, but just based on what I know of the differences between the mediums I can't imagine it's anything like the process for creating hand-drawn animation. I'd be happy to be proved wrong, of course.
AFAIK, creating pixel art is a very different process than traditional animation. You essentially "place" each pixel, one by one or in groups with more advanced tools, and then create animations as sequences of these individually-crafted pixel frames. Pixel art animations tend to be lower in total number of frames than traditional animations because each frame is very time-consuming to create.
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