/vr/ - Retro Games

>An Amiga, Deluxe Paint and a mouse. From the late 80s to the early 90s, these 3 tools were at the core of numerous graphic designers’ workstations in the West. It took years for the Japanese industry to start adopting commercial engines such as Unity and Unreal Engine, most of those companies were used to develop their own engines before that. This home-made approach wasn’t exclusive to game engines; at a time when most Western companies used the same sound engine on Mega Drive -GEMS-, Japanese developers often produced their own. Regarding graphic design, it was pretty much the same: there was almost one kind of setting per company in Japan.

I] Designing graphics with a computer

1) The hexadecimal era
When personal computers started to appear on the market in the late 70s, the vast majority of developers were programmers, which implied that they also often took charge of both the visual and audio aspects of their games. However, in the late 70s a few companies started hiring designers and animators in order to create their game graphics, a task often combined with the creation of logos and illustrations. Such was the case with Hiroshi Ono who designed graphics and logos for many Namco games since 1979: Galaxian, Mappy, Xevious, Pac-Man, Dig Dug and many more.