The Art Of The 8-Bit Loading Screen
Back in the 8-bit era, loading screens were a chance for artists to let their creativity run wild – so long as the computer was able to keep up. We’ve gathered a selection of artists to find out how these iconic images came to be…
Ste Pickford, Jonathan Temples and others explain the intricacies of making 8-bit art
This might sound a little strange to those readers who have always been accustomed to the instant gratification of cartridge games, but we can’t help feeling sorry for players who haven’t spent a significant amount of time loading games from cassette. There’s just a certain ritualistic pleasure that comes with those old magnetic tapes – making sure they have been fully rewound, entering the loading command, the optional trip to the kitchen to grab a snack or hot drink, and then that glorious moment where the first row of graphical data is drawn to the screen.
Loading screens were an important fixed point of any 8-bit computer game. They were the first thing that anyone would see of a game, and since the program still hadn’t fully loaded, you’d be looking at them for at least a little while. Some of them were of little note, but the best remain stuck in our memories to this day. “It has to reflect the game and give you an indication of what you are expecting,” says Shaun Mcclure, a veteran ZX Spectrum artist. Bill Harbison agrees, adding that a good loading screen “should also be interesting enough to withstand multiple viewings as it will be on the TV screen for a long time”.
Yet, for publishers, loading screens were often at the bottom of the priority list. “The loading screen was usually the last thing to be done and because of that they had to be completed as soon as possible, normally three to four days,” says Bill. Ste Pickford, who created loading screens across the ZX Spectrum, Amstrad CPC and Commodore 64, has similar memories. “Typically you’d get a request from the boss along the lines of, ‘Shit, we need a loading screen for tomorrow, can you do it?’ That was it, so I had to come up with an idea, and implement it, usually just in a day or two, while the programmer was frantically trying to finish the game a couple of desks over.”
With a relatively casual attitude towards having loading screens done at all, you won’t be surprised to find that artistic direction was often thin on the ground. “That was why doing loading screens was so much fun – you were just left to it,” says Ste. “We never even saw the cover art for the games until after they were released. We weren’t honoured enough to be shown cover art in advance, and we certainly weren’t consulted on cover art (even when we’d created and designed the game from scratch),” he explains. “As far as we, the devs, were concerned, nothing existed outside of the game itself.”
As a result, Ste would take creative licence to produce his own take on the concept. “For games like Feud or Zub or Amaurote I was trying to create something that would work as a cover design, imagining I was the cover artist. For some of the earlier ones I did, like Omega Mission or Glass, I was just trying to capture the feel or mood of the game, as best I could in one or two days.” One of Ste’s better-known games did have something to work from, though. “Ghosts ‘N’ Goblins was an existing arcade game, and I found some art from Capcom (although I didn’t think it was provided to me – I think I found it myself) which I based the loading screen on.”
For Bill, the level of initial input varied. “On Daley Thompson and Robocop, I was given a raw image digitised with a video camera as a template to which I added colour and shading. With Chase HQ I think I got an early black and white photocopy of Bob Wakelin’s unfinished cover art, but for Wec Le Mans I had nothing,” he explains. “I had to create a loading screen in a few days with zero reference. Of course, there was no internet back then so I couldn’t just search for an image online, in those days you either had to buy a book with some good pictures or go to the library. I didn’t have the time to do either.”
“I sort of started in the industry by working for a company called D&H Games in Stevenage – and they were lovely,” says Shaun. “I sent them some pathetic cover tape of my Zenobi art and told them that I could do… I think I quoted ‘£10 for black and white and £15 for colour’ – or something ridiculous – and told them I didn’t even have a bank account and could they pay me in cash?” This was bold, but it paid off. “I was a little kid still at school growing up in Yorkshire and – fuck me – they sent me £60 in cash in an envelope, told me that they paid £20 for colour ones and that’s all they were interested in.”
“I forget the games that I did for them for that – there was three of them, but D&H had so many games that were either football related or sports – sorts of all melts into your mind after a while!” The subject matter made it easy for Shaun to find inspiration. “I did a ton of work for D&H and I just got a title to use – and I wasn’t a football fan at the time, so I’d just look at the national papers and get a good shot of someone scoring a goal or something. Trace that – Bob’s your uncle!” As times moved on, things changed. “Later, it was basically just the box artwork and you’d feel better for it – no chance to mess it up.”
For Knights Of Bytes, an adaptation of the cover art was the basis for the loading art in the excellent modern C64 platformer Sam’s Journey. “The cover art was drawn first as a high resolution hand-drawn picture. Hence, it was the source of all subsequent drawings,” explains Chester Kollschen, the game’s programmer. “The cover art was in the portrait orientation, whereas the title picture for the C64 game needed to be landscape, so we chose a good region of the cover art and used it as the template for the
C64 title picture.”
Of course, knowing what to draw was only half the battle – actually getting the idea on the screen was also tricky, and as with any artistic endeavour, the process differs from artist to artist.
There was no internet back then so I couldn’t just search for an image online
Bill Harbison
Occasionally, things began off-screen. “I used to draw things in clear acetate and then stick that with Sellotape to the actual TV screen (yes we used those
– I had a little portable TV set),” says Shaun. “Then the hard part. I would have to draw the images in red pen (that was important) to the screen, and then sit there rigidly so I could see the image over the screen and trace under it with the little pixel cursor. I used something called Melbourne Draw – and that was a key to doing great art – because you could press G and get a black and white grid of the attributes on the screen in each 8x8 boundary.”
Melbourne Draw was a popular tool with ZX Spectrum artists, to the point that Ocean even used a modified internal version known as Ocean Draw. “Basically, once you made the image, you could zoom in too and sort out any problems with colour clash – [it] usually loads, as you would imagine,” says Shaun, explaining its advantages. “But it taught me techniques such as using stippling to hide areas that we did get large amounts of colour clash or indeed – add more ‘colour’ (interim shading).”
For Bill, everything is done straight to digital. “If I’m not working on a predigitised screen I usually start sketching on the computer,” he says. “Once I’ve got an idea of where the picture elements should be I then start adding colour and work out where to add masking to hide the attribute clash.” Bill’s one major bugbear is a common one, too: “The main limitation was plotting pixels on the screen with just the rubber-keyed Spectrum. When I was drawing some new screens in Photoshop recently I was shocked that I would have had the patience to draw an entire screen without a mouse.”
Ste worked very differently in the Eighties to today. “I’m embarrassed to admit it now, but I think I just started drawing in pixels on the screen. I guess I was young and enthusiastic! I don’t do any work now without lots of sketching and roughing out first on paper, but I hardly ever did any planning back then,” he admits. “This was crazy really, as none of the art packages had the ability to cut and paste. If you drew something in the wrong position on the screen – if something was eight pixels too far to the right, you couldn’t grab it and move it left by eight pixels, like you can in any modern art package. You had to redraw every single pixel again eight pixels further left, then delete the originals.”
Working across multiple formats, Ste found that he usually had to prioritise formats based on deadlines, and would often only have time to draw one version, with others converted by a coder. There was a notable exception, however: “On Feud I did different loading screens for the Spectrum and Amstrad versions. This wasn’t requested by the studio, this was just me showing off, and trying the elevate the game to be a bit more than just a project finished as quickly as possible, which was all the boss wanted. I deliberately did the Amstrad screen first using colours in such a way that it could not be converted to the Spectrum, then I had a justification for spending extra time designing a completely new Spectrum loading screen.”
Ste also had the ability to play favourites. “I enjoyed the Amstrad the most. Partly because there was no attribute clash to worry about, and you had a nice set of colours to use. And partly because the Amstrad came with its own nice monitor, which was nice and clear, whereas on the Spectrum or C64 I was using a 14-inch TV with RF input, and the picture was painful on the eyes.” The Commodore 64 earned his ire, however. “I generally hated working on the C64. All the graphics packages were garbage, and you had to draw with a joystick, which was a nightmare.”
The Knights Of Bytes team didn’t have that problem – but then, they were able to take advantage of sophisticated digital art tools that weren’t available in the Eighties. However, they did choose to use a regular C64 graphics mode for Sam’s Journey, which proved to be a limiting factor. “There are ways to increase the C64 graphic display capabilities, often shown in demos.
But for Sam’s Journey, we opted for a ‘classic’ C64 multicolour bitmap picture without any additions,” explains Chester. This meant severe colour restrictions, as only three colours could be chosen per 8x8 tiles. “The way the classic graphics chip produces the picture, graphic artists have to put some thoughts in the colour model before even starting to set pixels in the canvas.” Could this be mitigated by aligning elements to the grid of 8x8 tiles? “Yes, but that’s almost impossible
to do with a natural scene such as a picture.” The result is that a lot of editing is required to get an optimal image.
Bill found himself in the same editing predicament with Daley Thompson’s Olympic Challenge – an impressively shaded image. “I was given a crude digitised picture taken with a video camera and had to tidy it up and add colour and detail,” he explains. “There was quite a lot of ‘tidying’ required so I had to stipple the pixels and make them look like the shading was becoming lighter and darker. There were also a lot of stray pixels that needed deleting.”
Though these screens usually took a few days at most to create, they’ve remained in players’ memories for decades – and each of our interviewees had their own favourites in the wider world. Shaun has a number of favourites. “Where do I start? Anything that Ultimate [did], plus anything David Thorpe did – Simon Butler was good, too – Martin Wheeler had his moments. Ste Pickford? All really good!” For Ste himself, it’s another one of our interviewees who proves memorable. “There were loads that were way better than mine, but
I’m terrible at remembering names, so I can’t namecheck anyone unfortunately. Actually, Bill Harbison did some ace work at Ocean on the Spectrum.”
“The loading picture of Rainbow Island on the C64 did impress me as it also managed to show many details despite the overall low resolution,” explains Chester. “Although Rainbow Island is not the newest title, its picture came to me first. But there are many others as well. Grand Monster Slam had a very good picture, too, although I never really got a grip with the game itself.” Bill looks to one of the early Spectrum artists: “Like most people I was greatly inspired by the work of FD Thorpe. The screens for Pogo,
Spy Hunter, and Eskimo Eddie were particularly inspiring with his use of colour and detail. He set the bar to almost impossible heights not only with his quality of work but also the amount of screens in his portfolio. I still think he’s the king on the ZX Spectrum.”
It’s been said that restrictions breed creativity, and 8-bit loading screen art will forever be a great example of that. When machines struggled to even do so much as display a full-screen colour image, one set of skills wasn’t enough – artistic skill and technical knowledge were both key to creating a great loading screen. As computers have become more powerful and the restrictions were lifted, that intersection of skills has become a little redundant. Of course, iconic loading screens didn’t disappear at the end of the 8-bit era, but that’s a story for another time. For now, just get a cup of tea, put on a great 8-bit game and take the time to admire its loading screen. Hopefully, you’ll see it in a whole new light.
I generally hated working on the C64. All the graphics packages were garbage Ste Pickford