The game developers striving to get closer to the past, one glowing dot at a time
There’s a shift happening in the way people think about videogames inspired by years gone by. As the quality of the pixel art in Square Enix’s Final Fantasy remasters sparks hot debate, interest in how display technologies impact on game art is buoyed by the likes of the popular CRT Pixels Twitter account and the market grows for products that help people get better image quality from vintage consoles on modern displays, there’s a related trend emerging for developers to push the inspiration they take from the videogames of the ’80s and ’90s to new extremes. Not very long ago, giving a game a retro vibe involved simply rendering it with pronounced pixels. Nowadays, it goes a lot deeper than that.
DEMON THROTTLE IS COMMITTING TO ITS RETRO PREMISE TO THE EXTENT THAT ONLY PHYSICAL COPIES OF THE GAME WILL BE RELEASED
Modern videogames taking inspiration from old ones is, of course, nothing new: after the indie gaming boom of the late 2000s, we were inundated with 16bit-inspired pixel art games. Over time, however, pixel art has transformed from being synonymous with retro revivalism to become an aesthetic of its own. In videogames such as Narita Boy, Demon Throttle, Arcade Paradise, Cursed Castilla, Super Hydorah and Blazing Chrome, we’re seeing a move to re-establish that connection to the past by going way beyond simply using pixel art to evoke times gone by. These games attempt to emulate the look and even the sound of the technology of earlier eras, leaving us in no doubt about their desire to transport us to another time. What is motivating developers to push things to another level, and how are they achieving it?
For Ed Fornieles, creative director of Narita Boy, from Spanish team Studio Koba, the answer is deeply personal. “I made a retroinfluenced game because I wanted to explore my own experience from that time, when I played as a kid on the arcade cabinets in my village in the summers of the ’80s,” he says. “I wanted to talk about nostalgia, as a player, as a child, and create the aesthetic of it. I wanted to capture a feeling of something lost, a time that has gone and is never going to come back – a time when my generation grew, looking at what we experienced, the way games and cultural products were made, with everything wrapped in a kind of innocence.”
To do that, Narita Boy uses pixel art as a basis but goes significantly further, emulating some of the artifacts of vintage CRT televisions using a combination of post-processing filter effects powered by Unity. “Many people said, ‘Why are you pouring on this amount of filters? Your pixel art looks gorgeous,’” Fornieles recalls. “My answer was that it is not about the art itself, it’s about the feeling.”
The approaches developers are taking to evoke this feeling span a wide spectrum. At this year’s E3 we were introduced to Replaced,a
game that instantly conjures up another era but does so without using the visual artifacts employed by Narita Boy. Having said that, the appearance of an in-game CRT is one of the key ways that the game orients us in time – time being an alternate version of the 1980s in this case. “It was a deliberate choice to start the trailer with a CRT display,” says Yura Zdanovich of Replaced developer Sad Cat Studios. “It’s one of the most prominent visual cues when we talk about retro technology. We absolutely adore these kinds of things and it will appear in the game, but you’ll have to play it yourself to find out exactly how.”
Outside of that, the game doesn’t try to take us back to the ’80s by looking like it’s being displayed by the technology of that era, but instead by emulating the vision that you might expect from a piece of media created in that time period. “One of our goals is to capture how science fiction was envisioned back then and mix it with some retro or classic elements of that era,” Sad Cat Studios’ Igor Gritsay says. “[The style is] ‘cassette futurism’.”
Taking things to the extreme is Doinksoft’s Demon Throttle, which is committing to its retro premise to the extent that only physical copies of the game will be released. One look at the game in action is enough to tell you how much effort has gone into making it look like the real deal. Gameplay designer Cullen Dwyer made a post-processing shader to emulate a CRT display that goes beyond most other examples. “All the art in the game is regular, sharp pixel art, and then it is fed through an effect that makes it appear ‘fuzzy’,” he tells us. “A lot of people do scanline shaders, and some light curvature around the edges of the screen to emulate the roundness of a CRT – sometimes these turn out good, but they can look a little tacky if you don’t get it just right. I elected to use animated scanlines which alternate every couple frames, offsetting the pixels in each row horizontally by a little bit. When you play it fast, it gives a certain fuzziness, like the signal has a little bit
of static on an old system.” That would produce evocative results in itself, but there are further layers. “I also have the scanlines apply a bit of a warm colour correction, amplifying the reds and the greens while muting the blues, and then the colours of any given pixel average with the colours of nearby ones,” Dwyer explains. The finishing touch is a screen format closer to 4:3 than 16:9. “We chose a more square-ish resolution to sell the style a bit more, but also because vertical shmups are harder to design in widescreen aspect ratios.”
If you’ve seen the Demon Throttle reveal trailer, you’ll have noticed that the game doesn’t just look like an old game, it sounds like one too, with low-quality voice samples helping to sell the old-school aesthetic.
“We recorded all of the speech onto the computer in high quality, and then ran them through the Delta PCM channel in Famitracker, an NES chiptune tracker, which downsamples the waveforms into ones that are compatible with the NES,” Dwyer explains. “Actually, all of the sound effects in the game were made in Famitracker, which means that conceivably – besides the amount of sound effects being played at one time – all of the sounds could be played on real NES hardware.”
Doinksoft isn’t the only developer to recognise the importance of sound in evoking the flavour of a different age. Gryzor87, a musician who works in collaboration with Spanish game designer Locomalito, talks us through the process of creating sound effects for the 2016 release Cursed Castilla, ensuring that they felt authentic to the Yamaha YM2203 chip that was used for Capcom coin-ops of the ’80s including 1943 and Gun Smoke.
“I coded directly on a tracker oriented to dump data on the real chip, but the result is an emulated sound of that chip, really not far from the original since they both manage digital waveforms,” Gryzor87 says. “The sound chip has been modelled after the real specs we find in the original YM2203, and we can find this sound in all MAME-emulated games –
Commando, Tiger Road, Black Tiger, to name just a few. I think sound is an important part of the arcade identity, and for this reason we decided to include it, just to give the game more flavour and solidity.”
In considering why such authenticity is so important, we turn to Jordan Starkweather, who cites Locomalito and Gryzor87’s Cursed Castilla and Super Hydorah as personal favourites among modern games honouring the past. Starkweather is the person behind CRT Pixels, a Twitter account dedicated to photography showcasing the nuances of pixel art on CRT displays versus ‘raw’ pixel versions of the same images. Clearly the account spoke to people: it launched in February and now has nearly 50,000 followers. “Game visuals originally looked much less pixelated than we think of them today,” Starkweather says, reflecting on the inspiration for his Twitter posts. “There was often a smooth, blended look to most pixelated games, particularly in the 16bit era when the Sega Genesis was utilising some of the blurriest composite video ever, and most SNES models output a blurrier image no matter what input was used. Game developers knew this and often did their best to work around it, eventually even utilising this softer picture to hide artifacting, or to create the illusion of additional detail. Indie devs have gotten much better at creating retro experiences that feel accurate to the era they’re imitating, but Locomalito was the first I felt excelled at it.”
Indies are leading the way in the field of CRT filters, making the kind of display features of Nintendo’s mini NES and SNES consoles feel basic. “While many retro-style games will include a scanline filter, not many go to the lengths of creating a filter that actually blends the pixels together in a way that looks natural and real, while also not feeling distracting,” Starkweather says. “Sonic Mania and Blazing Chrome are another couple of recent favourite examples, although they appear to aim for more of that sharp, RGB-style CRT image.”
While it’s true that Demon Throttle and Cursed Castilla feel closer to what we actually played in the 1980s in comparison to a game such as Replaced, we should be careful about thinking about this trend to evoke the past in terms of authenticity versus inauthenticity. Locomalito himself points out that, as much effort as he puts into recreating the look of old hardware, he’s still creating an impression rather than replicating reality. Ultimately, he views the choices he makes as stylistic ones.
“If you take pictures of actual arcade monitors, you can see that scanlines are not just black horizontal lines – pixels look rounded, bright pixels feel bigger than dark ones, there’s colour distortion, and small vertical lines,” he notes. “We’d need a very high screen resolution and computer power to fully mimic what the eye can see there, so in the end we just have to focus on the most perceptible features. In the case of domestic games of the ’80s and ’90s, every CRT display was different. There’s even a difference between how NTSC and PAL screens look. So, in the end, the shader is a design choice as heavy as the colour palette [choice].” Just as with Narita Boy, we’re back to the goal of trying to capture a feeling.
The easy way to explain why developers might be reaching for this feeling – and why consumers clamour for it – is to chalk it up to
CLEARLY THE CRT PIXELS ACCOUNT SPOKE TO PEOPLE: IT LAUNCHED IN FEBRUARY AND NOW HAS NEARLY 50,000 FOLLOWERS
nostalgia and leave it there. Everyone we talk to here acknowledges that nostalgia is a central aspect of the appeal of these games – but equally they agree that it’s only part of the story.
Take the example of Nosebleed Interactive’s forthcoming Arcade Paradise, in which you launch and manage your own arcade, stocking it with vintage-looking cabinets. As with some of the aforementioned games, a lot of focus here is placed on replicating a look that feels believable, even if the cabinets are all entirely fictional works. “It was really important to achieve an authentic look and feel in the space, so we make heavy use of shaders and post effects to give all our cabinets various CRT artifacts,” game director Andreas Firnigl tells us.
Arcade Paradise goes beyond making its games look authentic, and tries to capture a pitch-perfect vibe for the arcade itself. “Weirdly, getting the look and feel of the lighting in the arcade right has been quite a headache, as we want there to be a definite glow to the screens and neons,” Firnigl explains. “In order to do that you need to really nail the ambient lighting so it doesn’t bloom out elsewhere.”
Yet, despite the effort involved in capturing the feel of a real decades-old arcade, this isn’t a game made by people trying to recapture their youth. “We’ve got a couple of people on the team who’ve very recently graduated and who weren’t even born when the game is set,” Firnigl says, “but it definitely scratches an itch of theirs too. I think there’s definitely a sort of fauxnostalgia, for want of a better description. You see it with the key audience for stuff like Stranger Things and Ready Player One, or even just current fashion trends. Actually, I was digitising a bunch of old slides of my parents that went right back to the ’60s recently and it was just this really fascinating window into the past. I’d like to think, with the music, and look, and feel and the games of Arcade Paradise, that’s one of the things we’re offering – a sort of glimpse into the past. It’s as much about the atmosphere as it is about the games.”
“It’s definitely more than just nostalgia,” Zdanovich says. “All our team members were born in the ’00s, ’90s or late ’80s, so we don’t have many memories of the actual ’80s. We think the ’80s were sort of a breaking point for pop culture, when it started to get more mature. Yes, it was still goofy at times, but it evolved rapidly. Comic books started to tackle darker topics, sci-fi movies began to feel less naïve, the music production quality bar was raised…”
Even for Locomalito, whose work is among the most faithful retro-inspired fare, the motivation is more about signalling what to expect from the game than it is about nostalgia. “[These games] may look appealing for people who feel nostalgic about the ’80s, but I don’t
“ALL OUR TEAM MEMBERS WERE BORN IN THE ’00s, ’90s OR LATE ’80s, SO WE DON’T HAVE MANY MEMORIES OF THE ACTUAL ’80s”
think that’s the point at all,” he argues. “What our games are trying to say with their particular ‘arcadey’ style is, ‘Hey, we’re bringing back casual challenges for people who love action games but prefer quick runs instead of long playing sessions’. I feel this is particularly useful for people who have limited spare time. It’s easier to limit your playing sessions when you have a ‘game over’ screen and a ‘continue?’ question, and it’s easier to feel satisfied with the time invested when you can go through different levels and bosses within minutes.”
For Dwyer, too, who is the youngest member of the Doinksoft team and wasn’t around when the games the studio uses for inspiration were originally released, the appeal of the aesthetic is about what it signals. “I’d say that my love and draw towards retro games isn’t actually about nostalgia at all. It’s more this feeling of a lack of a design rulebook with all these old games that makes them feel special,” he says. “Developers were really out there trying strange things and inventing and innovating – even if a lot of those ideas didn’t quite stick – in a way that doesn’t happen as often now, I think. So, I guess the appeal to people who didn’t grow up with the games that inspired Demon Throttle is the same appeal that we had to make it in the first place: try out an experimental, goofy game. It might be different than what you’re used to playing, but that’s exciting, isn’t it?”
There is no single explanation for the trend for games taking their imitation of vintage games to the next level. Yes, it’s nostalgia, but it’s also the contingent coalition of interest in old technologies with the capability and collective knowledge to emulate those technologies, plus more things besides.
We quite like Dwyer’s suggestion, though. Perhaps this is about a desire to return to a time when things felt more open, the rules less defined. Maybe all of this doesn’t need to be rendered in obvious pixels at all – in a CRT style or otherwise. Could it really be about returning to gaming’s formative moments in search of a sense of possibility lacking in the present?