/vr/ - Retro Games

Surprisingly, the graphic designers who worked at Nintendo in the 80s had to use an odd digitizing tool for relatively simple sprites, including those from Super Mario Bros. (1985). They followed the same process one year prior when developing the arcade game Punch-Out!! (1984), a game for which former Toei animator Takao Kōzai painted the game characters on cels. These characters were way bigger than those appearing in Super Mario Bros. and had to be redrawn on grid paper in their sprite form by Nintendo’s graphic designers, as recalls Shigeru Miyamoto: ”The tool for importing pictures as they were drawn by an animator wasn’t remotely useable. […] That’s why we printed giant, desk-sized sheets of graph paper and drew everything by hand. […] importing that as data just made it easier for the programmer, but not for the designer. […] Because we had to draw giant pixel images, all by hand. It was just a process that automated inputting the pixel images we drew with a scanner. […] But I couldn’t do all of it alone, so I drew the outline and a woman who was assisting me colored it.“