Is Taito's sprite work underapprecated?

When people talk about the pinnacle of 2d Ark System works comes up then what Capcom did with Street Fighter 3.

But I don't really see anybody talk about what Taito was doing in the 80s and early 90s.

Just look at warrior blade no jaggies at all, it's a game but it's still great pixel art.


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Then you had the Backgrounds in Darius 1 and 2. The semi realism in Elevator action returns. Nobody really ever talks about Dino Rex, it was Primal rage before Primal rage.

There's a lot of 2d sprite work in the arcades that doesn't get much love but for a company as bit as Taito, I almost never see anybody mentioning how good their arcade sprite work was.

 

It has a lot to do with their art style. While it looks clean it's not quite as appealing as say a capcom or Konami game. Think of it like Sega's Spider-Man and DD Wrecking Crew arcade games. Well done graphics but art style is just not appealing. Shame since in that era Taito had to use an arcade stick to draw all those graphics!

 

Wait, what do you mean? Like they had a program they wrote where they moved a cursor around and placed pixels with a joystick and exported the resulting sprites? Do you have an article that explains this or some pictures or videos of graphics development that shows this because it seems crazy, fascinating, tedious, and pretty cool all at once.

 

I liked the Rastan graphics. I wish they did something along those lines for the sequels. The sequels were nowhere near as good.

 

No, hes mixing things up a bit. In the late 80ies and early 90ies Deluxe Paint was the pretty much standard for pixel artwork (Released in 1985, together with the Amiga 1000), noone, beside crazy sceners , used a Joystick by then anymore.

But before, in 8bit days, it was pretty common to control your graphics software with a joystick (good example is Koala Paint on c64).

Edit: seems like bigger japanese studios had own technology: http://videogamesdensetsu.tumblr.co...-sega-digitizer-system-a-tool-used-by-graphic

 

edit2: not that my first comment misleads: x68000 was more common for gfx works in japan, but im sure they had some software similar/copy of to deluxe paint and used a mouse.

 

I'm not at all mixing it up, I read it in an interview with a Taito developer who worked there in the late 80s early 90s in Untold History of Japanese Game Development. They had a couple of arcade machines networked to each other and one did graphics. Only one computer was avalible to save work. A lot of Japanese companies did have that kind of setup cause of expense and the types of computers they were using.

Capcom had a custom setup that worked with a 68000 while Sega had this huge hulking one where you could actually draw on screen the screen itself with a pen called a digitizer. Until snes Nintendo was was still using controllers.

 

im still sure this was about earlier 80ies. As said, from 85 on Deluxe Paint set new standards, everyone doing hires gfx with a joystick must be a serious madman (Just try ). Amiga was fairly cheap compared to anything else development hardware wise, also the x68000, while much more expensive, was a easy and affordable solution for most studios.
And Capcom used nothing custom from cps on for sure, they used x68000 machines, the cps hardware is even based on them, just more powerful.

edit: its also pretty obvious if you have a look at which year taito graphics pretty much turned to 16 bit levels, 86-87 stuff looks very much like d-paint, the fillins and effects and limited colour palette ...... . From late 87 on its obviously x68000, the palettes and resolutions give a few hints to this.

also i wouldnt wonder if the guy exaggerated a bit in the interview or simply mixed up his timeline a bit, doesnt it sounds much cooler to say all that was done still with a joystick ?
Japan was super tech savvy at this time, jumping to new technologies in very short time was very common.

edit2: also just have a look at late 80ies taito arcade conversions, pretty much all of them have pixelperfect x68000 versions .......

 

I agree about the madman part but it's true. Developer even says the arcade boards being used were hacked camletry boards which was an arcade game released in 89. Even Super Mario Bros 3 has a picture of a pixel artist using a controller to draw art. Japan didn't really start using western computers for game development till early 90s. Even using standard art programs for video games in Japan wasn't done till mid 90s when they started doing 3D. Of course a lot of times they'd draw it on graph paper first and someone would input with a controller using the coordinates of the graph paper as a guide.

 

That article/post is so cool. I love seeing any photos or videos of game development in the 80's and 90's. I'll have to find more on the Digitizer. Speaking of Sega, I once saw a video that showed STI making the sprites and character animations for Comix Zone that showed them using what appeared to be Deluxe Paint Animation.

 

This thread took an interesting turn. Glad I made it.
I played some Darius this morning, game is almost 30 years old and those backgrounds could not be more crisp.
I played through a random course in Night Striker last night and I think Taito surpassed what Sega was going and Sega still Floors me with the
super scaler games. Taito just took it to another level.

I can't take any thing away from Konami and Irem either. R-Type Leo still looks good. Konami's Violent Storm has aged very, VERY well.

 

Chase H.Q, Special Criminal Investigation, Galactic Storm (Yakumo covered this on one of this videos) are some others that comes to mind.

 

Despite your insistance there are arcade drawing program cabinets. I find it unpractical and do not believe it. The developer was embelleshing facts to make the interview interesting. Since he's the only one that says it was like that I'd say don't believe everything you believe.

 

Yeah, I hate to admit it but Bother Chase and HQ and SCI do Outrun's graphics better than Outrun. Lets not forget Continental Circus either.

I'm looking into the Joystick claim now. But Googling "Taito Sprite work" Brings up this thread and that's pretty much it.

 

The interviewer actually asked him how art was drawn and what kind of setup it was. I will make a correction it was actually hacked Qix boards. He definitely wasn't embellishing, kind of casually explaining it and even mentioned that he thought it was a ridicules setup. Taito possibly didn't quite have the kind of money other developers had or engineers for that matter to make a practical drawing setup at that time.

Other artist in both volumes of the book have mentioned using other setups one even menetioning a setup that involved color diodes. I thought it was crazy too but I've seen a picture online of this kind of setup and well it's bizarre tbh. Keep in mind even in this period most developers didn't have a standard for drawing art. Everyone was using differently setups based on hardware, engineers, and cost for development environment. I have mentioned that a lot art would be drawn on graph paper first so artist could more easily input with controller.

 

Part of the issue on that is the author of the book who often contributes to Hardcore gaming 101 and Retro Gamer is very protective of his work so posting any transcripts or video online usually requires permission from him if you don't want be pursued. If you don't want spend $35 on each book you can get both for $8 a piece digitally on kindle lot of great developer stories in these books.

 

http://www.mobygames.com/developer/sheet/view/developerId,198161/ Image from companion DVD of tatio artist drawing development setup. Interviewering even ask for clairfication that only arcade stick was used. Artist name is Masayuki Suzuki who is respected in the industry his profile is in the top of this image.

 

Oh it's in the massive text book sized "Untold stories of Japanese game developers"?

Why didn't you say so. I've been meaning to pick those up to read on the shitter.

 

Yea it is. The stories these developers tell in the book are pretty insane. Amazon sells it in the US.

 

I can imagine, They were a dedicated lot.