The Console Artist's Vision Pt. 1: Developers Speak on Designing the Graphics for CRTs

Introduction

The Bitmap Brothers, the creators of Speedball and many other titles, stated, "You want the industry to be taken seriously, you want the artform to be taken seriously."^[1] Some cultures respect video games moreso as a serious art form than others, as witnessed in Japan where magazines such as Beep! MegaDrive regularly printed extensive developer interviews, versus some other countries where video games have a history of being popularly dismissed as merely toys for children.

For the artists and consumers who share the sentiment of treating video games as a serious art form, what are the standards for serious treatment and presentation?

"There are many questions to be considered in the conservation and reinstallation of the work. What did the artist originally intend and how has that concept been realized in the past? How can one preserve and document the installation?" -Inside Installations: Theory and Practice in the care of Complex Artworks, p.11^[2]

It is well established that the artist is closely consulted on the presentation of the piece.

"When matters of reinstallation or conservation are at stake, answers are searched for in artist’s statements and interviews...the artist, although not being the actual owner of the work, is generally considered to be a — if not the — crucial stakeholder in the perpetuation of the work" -Saaze, Installation Art and the Museum, p.117^[3]

That being said, the following is a compilation of interview excerpts on the development process & intended presentation of home console game art for CRTs.

Note that RF and composite have the ability to blend dithering patterns, unlike RGB, component, and S-Video (there being an exception for very small, low line count sets). For some context, the Genesis/Mega Drive came with a composite cable in Japan, and an RF adapter in most other countries including in Europe^[4]. On the Sega Genesis and Saturn, dithering patterns were most commonly used to create transparency effects for shadows, clouds, water, and spotlights. Beyond that, they were also used for sky and floor gradients, as well as to generate additional colors wherever else desired. They can either be rendered as a blend of neighboring pixels (just as a painter mixes base colors to access more colors), or instead, be displayed as an unblended, lower color depth checkered or alternating stripe pattern. Some common comb filters used in TVs also prevent blending in RF/Composite, so be sure to check that it's working in your setup.

When using RF/Composite, certain artifacts can appear to varying degrees, such as dot crawl/hanging dots (cross luminance/chroma mesh failure) and "rainbowing" (cross color). These artifacts can be mitigated as desired based on hardware component selection, which will be covered in a separate article.

NES / Famicom

• Yoshimiru Hoshi - Metal Slader Glory (NES/SNES), Gall Force (MSX), Fire Bam (NES), etc.

  "There was nothing we could do about the colours changing between the development monitors and a normal TV, but pixel art made for a clear RGB monitor and art made to look good on a TV set is completely different. So before development when we were deciding which look to go for I chose to prioritize home TV sets without hesitation and started drawing with that in mind." -Translated by Peter Bernard

PC Engine / TurboGrafx-16 (*and Mega Drive)

• Masayuki Suzuki - Langrisser II, Warsong, Target Earth, etc.

John Szczepaniak: Did you have to consider TV refresh rates?

Masayuki Suzuki: We did not have to take that into consideration. We were more concerned with the color blending and bleed on the PC Engine and the Mega Drive. There was a difference in how colors blended on these systems, so we took that into account.

The Untold History of Japanese Game Developers Volume 2

Sega Genesis / Mega Drive

• Louis Castle - The Lion King, Dungeons & Dragons: Warriors of the Eternal Sun, etc.

"You can actually see every single pixel which means it looks nothing like it did back in the 90s. Those hash patterns actually on the televisions of the day would've blurred together into very nice gradients. I think that's why people have a misimpression of how this stuff looked."

"Again, it doesn't do it justice when you see it all pixelated, because on a television of the day this was all very smooth and the palettes really matched the beautiful work."

Devs Play S01E01

• Eric Iwasaki - X-Men, Spider-Man, Menacer 6-Game Cartridge, etc.

"[Eric] Iwasaki and the other artists used a Sega-developed program called Megawice for laying out art within 8x8 character tile maps. This was a common method on hardware of the period, as it efficiently rendered sprites and scrolling backgrounds. The artists would create their sprites in Deluxe Paint: Animation and then import them into Megawice. Then, they previewed the graphics on an actual television connected to Genesis hardware."

Playing at the Next Level: A History of American Sega Games, p.183

• Steve Ross - Chakan, X-Men, X-Men 2: Clone Wars, Pink Goes to Hollywood, Taz in Escape from Mars, etc.

"Steve Ross, the guy who was the lead on Chakan, was also the lead artist on X-Men. When I first met him, his ability to play with those limited pixels and palettes was really great. He had this amazing sense of 3D and shading and things. I'd never met someone who had that kind of skill with pixels. That was his thing. He did a lot of blending of different colors. You know, you were drawing things on a CRT, and you could be defeated by all the smearing of pixels...color changes ended up smearing across multiple pixels. You could find yourself defeated by that. It wasn't like drawing like an LCD display today. He took advantage of it though, and used all that blending to come up with in-between colors that weren't directly available on the palettes. A lot of the way to get any extra depth in the colors was doing these alternations from one pixel to the next between adjacent colors. When we looked at it on the Mac display, we'd look at the artwork coming in from the paint program, and it looked chunky. But then when you drew on the TV, it's like, 'Wow.' You'd see the end result. He was just a master at tuning that."

The Minds Behind Sega Genesis Games: Interviews with Creators and Developers, p.108-109

• Ellis Goodson - Jurassic Park, Technoclash, Shadowrun, Jurassic Park: Rampage Edition, Vectorman, Vectorman 2, etc.

"You would go to Ellis and you'd say, 'This background looks kind of plain. Let's put a section where there's a wooden fence.' Thinking he'd get back to you pretty quick. After a while you'd start thinking, 'Hey, where's Ellis?' You'd go over there and see an incredible fence on his monitor, but he would be really focused on one of the planks in the fence and how to render it properly, so that it looked really good on a television screen."

The Minds Behind Sega Genesis Games: Interviews with Creators and Developers, p.21

• Robert Hunter - Adventures of Batman & Robin, Batman Returns, etc.

Sega-16: Many artists had to find ways to work around the limited color palette of the Genesis. Was this ever a problem for you?

Robert Hunter: It was tough, but thanks to how fuzzy NTSC displays were, you could create very cool dithering patterns that looked seamless to give you more colors than really existed.

Sega-16 Interview^[5]

• Jeff Jonas - Vectorman, Jurassic Park, Shadowrun, etc.

"We had learned from Shiny Entertainment and other competitors how vertical line blending was more preferable on the TV than straight dithering. That is why everything looked weird on the PC. Those vertical lines blend automatically on the TV."

The Game of Nerds - Vectorman 25th Anniversary^[6]

• William Kier - Eternal Champions, Eternal Champions 2

Heather Anne Campbell: Do you have to do each dot in dithering?

William Kier: Yes

Heather Anne Campbell: You do?

William Kier: Yeah, you're just painting a checkerboard essentially.

Heather Anne Campbell: Oh my god.

William Kier: And it was - so on the computer it's very dithered but on the TVs we did it so that the colors would blend together better. But now when you look at it on the monitors, it's, you can see just all the-

Heather Anne Campbell: I thought that would be like a brush, where it would be like 'oh this section is dithered', but you did it manually.

William Kier: Oh man it was all mouse artwork, it took a long time.

How Did This Get Played? Ep. 19^[7]

• Ayano Koshiro - Streets of Rage 2, Beyond Oasis, etc.

Wada Makoto Mamoru: When you were developing for the Megadrive, what was the one hardware feature you wished for most?

Ayano Koshiro: Transparencies!

Wada Makoto Mamoru: Hah, I knew it.

Ayano Koshiro: Transparencies. The Super Famicom had those. Luckily the Megadrive could achieve a dithering effect by having the colors of long, thin pixel lines blend into each other. That’s why when we first saw that transparent waterfall in Sonic we were all really impressed. How did he do it? Then when I looked closely it was like, “oh, I see.” (laughs) That waterfall effect in Sonic was so pretty.

Shmuplations Translation^[8]

• Japanese Developer Ancient - Blog Post on Bare Knuckle II Development

"Today, we would use semi-transparency to represent spotlights, but the Mega Drive didn't have that function. So we created a pseudo-transparency by placing transparent and opaque pixels in a checkerboard pattern. This expression looked beautiful because of the TVs of the time, which were prone to bleeding, but on today's monitors, where the pixels are clearly visible, it looks dirty...on an actual TV it looks even more clear and beautiful."

Bare Knuckle II Development Blog^[9]

• William Anderson - Aladdin, Jungle Book, Cool Spot, etc.

"The way the Genesis works is if you space white lines one pixel apart form each other you can get a glass effect. But what we discovered at Virgin is if you put two different colors together, with that same effect you could get color bleed which would give you more colors on the Sega Genesis than technically you were supposed to have. If you actually look at the sprite sheets for Jungle Book, Cool Spot, Aladdin, you'll see there's actually these bands of lines in the artwork that look kind of weird. But if you take into consideration the bleeding effect, it explains why we're getting more colors than we should be getting, and it really did help with that authentic animation look. It made them look like they could be cartoons on TV."

The Retrohour Podcast^[7]

• Yasushi Yamaguchi - Super Thunderblade, Sorcerian, Kid Chameleon, Sonic CD, Sonic 2

• & Naoto Ohshima - Phantasy Star II, Sonic the Hedgehog, Last Battle, etc.

Naoto Ohshima: Back then, the TVs were CRTs. With the Mega Drive's limited number of colors, we made use of the CRT's blurriness.

Yasushi Yamaguchi: At the beginning we were making everything on RGB monitors, and we expected it to appear on the TV like that. But when we actually saw the output from a Mega Drive on a TV it was totally blurry.

Naoto Ohshima: We'd use that blurriness to create intermediate colors.

Yasushi Yamaguchi: Yeah. We started designing everything to make use of the blurriness, but the surprising problem now is that recent re-releases on the PS3 or PS4 display the pixels as-is. I want to say, "Stop that!"

-Phantasy Star: 31 Nenme no Genten^[8]