Image
  • Writing
    • Andy Gavin: Author
    • About my Novels & Writing
    • All Writing Posts
    • The Darkening Dream
      • Buy the Book Online
      • Sample Chapters
      • Reviews
      • Info for Reviewers
      • Press Coverage
      • Awards
      • Cast of Characters
    • Untimed
      • Buy Untimed Online
      • Book Trailer
      • Sample Chapters
      • Reviews
      • Info for Reviewers
      • Press Coverage
      • Awards
      • Cast of Characters
    • Scrivener – Writer’s Word Processor
    • iPad for Writers
    • Naughty Dark Contest
  • Books
    • Book Review Index
    • Favorite Fantasy Novels
    • Andy Gavin: Author
    • The Darkening Dream
      • Buy the Book Online
      • Sample Chapters
      • Short Story: Harvard Divinity
      • Reviews
      • Info for Reviewers
      • Press Coverage
      • Awards
      • Cast of Characters
    • Untimed
      • About the Book
      • Buy Untimed Online
      • Book Trailer
      • Sample Chapters
      • Reviews
      • Info for Reviewers
      • Press Coverage
      • Awards
      • Cast of Characters
    • Naughty Dark Contest
  • Games
    • My Video Game Career
    • Post Archive by Series
    • All Games Posts Inline
    • Making Crash Bandicoot
    • Crash 15th Anniversary Memories
    • World of Warcraft Endgames
    • Getting a Job Designing Video Games
    • Getting a Job Programming Video Games
    • Naughty Dark Contest
  • Movies
    • Movie Review Index
  • Television
    • TV Review Index
    • Buffy the Vampire Slayer
    • A Game of Thrones
  • Food
    • Food Review Index
    • Foodie Club
    • Hedonists
    • LA Sushi Index
    • Chinese Food Index
    • LA Peking Duck Guide
    • Eating Italy
    • Eating France
    • Eating Spain
    • Eating Croatia
    • Eating Vietnam
    • Eating Australia
    • Eating Israel
    • Ultimate Pizza
    • ThanksGavin
    • Margarita Mix
    • Foodie Photography
    • Burgundy Vintage Chart
  • Other
    • All Posts, Magazine Style
    • Archive of all Posts
    • Fiction
    • Technology
    • History
    • Anything Else
  • Gallery
  • Bio
  • About
    • About me
    • About my Writing
    • About my Video Games
    • Ask Me Anything
  • Contact

Archive for Nintendo

Golden Oldie – The Legend of Zelda

Feb07
The original cover

The original cover

In this case it’s literally a golden oldie, as the cartridge was gold (at least the earliest ones). And I still have that yellowing piece of plastic in my “cart box” but I didn’t actually need it this time (I sold my NES years ago anyway). This time, I booted the classic up on OpenEmu, an awesome new mac 8 and 16 bit emulator with masterly emulations of all the great 80s and early 90s systems (Gameboy, NES, SNES, Genesis, etc). Hey, and it’s fair use, because I did keep that cartridge (along with my other favorites).

For good reason, as The Legend of Zelda is one of the all time greats. A classic console game. A classic RPG. First in a legendary (haha) series and really one of the best games of all time, particularly when you place it into its context in the history of video games. Oh, and this time, I played it with my 5 year-old son. He mostly consulted from the arm of the chair (as the game is pretty hard), but he did love it, begging to play it day-in and day-out.

First a note on the emulation: Pretty much pitch perfect. I plugged a PS3 joypad into the Mac and the game looked, felt, and sounded exactly as it always did. The joypad controls are basically the same as a NES pad (except you don’t get that awful thumb burn the sharp plastic on the original led to). This is essential as emulated games require the right kind of controller. Console and arcade games are programmed for specific controllers —  I should know, having shipped 9 of them! — and they just don’t play right unless the hardware/software pairing is nearly exact. The emulator also allows you to save your state, which isn’t necessary with Zelda, as it has a battery backup (also emulated), but certainly helps with other games.

The original gold NES cart

The original gold NES cart

So how was it? Surprisingly, hardly dated at all. Fantasy is my favorite genre, hell, I convinced my dad to buy the computer so I could write a D&D magnum opus. And early games like Wizardry, Alkabeth, and Ultima I, were among my computer favorites. Adventure (the original Atari 2600 cart game) was another old favorite and is the clear progenitor to Zelda. This notion of video game pedigree has long been of interest to me. Like any other human art, games borrow from those who came before. And there’s nothing wrong with this. To claim that Zelda is any less a work of genius because it shares elements with earlier fantasy games is pure hogwash. The good ones integrate and add to the oeuvre. We will call the Adventure/Zelda school, which also includes arcade game Venture and who knows how many others, the action RPG.

The Zelda "stats screen" was extensive for the time

The Zelda “stats screen” was extensive for the time

Zelda doesn’t have character stats or experience like Ultima and Wizardry (which borrow more heavily from D&D), but it does have a fantasy setting an an upgradable character. In fact, one of Zelda’s cooler features is its large number of items/powerups. You can up Link’s  hit points (hearts), collect three swords, 2-3 shields, and a bevy of rings, bows, magic wands, and other magic items. I would argue that even a modern action dungeon crawler like Diablo III is a clear Zelda descendant.

art_thelegendofzelda_overworldmap

The monstrous outside world

What Zelda does have is a big outside world, nine (x2 sorta) sprawling dungeons, a host of enemies, lots of secrets, and a tough but addictive joypad-based action gameplay. The map is positively gimongous‎ by the standards of 1986. And this is many ways in which the gap between Adventure and Zelda is huge. Not only are there a lot of screens, but they actually look like something (Adventure‘s graphics are notoriously simplistic). The above map is comprised of 16×8 screens, each a bit different. The dungeons and various secret entrances and caves are tucked all over the place.

A typical outside screen, complete with enemies and cave

A typical outside screen, complete with enemies and cave

Wandering the outside takes up a good amount of time, with Link traversing between various dungeons and hunting for secrets. The outdoor enemies are tough at the start of the game, but easy enough once Link has powered up with the Blue Ring, Magic Shield, and some sort of distance weapon (the magic wand being one of the better ones). This brings me to one of Zelda’s design quirks. As the game progresses you increase the number of hearts (hit points), but when you die you always reset to three filled hearts. This necessitates visiting either a fairy or farming the monsters for hearts to reach full heath (often needed to get through a dungeon). And even odder by today’s standards, is the fact that only at full health can you fire the “beam sword” (launch your sword across the screen). This effectively makes the game “harder” when you’ve been hit, which goes against modern game design, but was typical of the more hardcore spirit of yesteryear. In fact, this whole setup isn’t so different from the typical arcade one in which you power up a life (typical in shooters like R-Type or even pseudo action RPG / platformer Ghouls and Ghosts). Zelda can be fairly unforgiving. The dpad control is a bit squirrelly, and the slightest bump against a foe or his flickery projectiles can cost you a heart (and your precious beam sword). It rewards patience and keeping your distance. Enemies randomly drop various gems (rupees), hearts, fairies, bombs, and the like. As my son put it, they can be “mean and stingy” (meaning that the RNG can really make or break you).

Fairy, how I love thee

Fairy, how I love thee

This also brings me to one of Zelda’s more peculiar design decisions. The world is littered with difficult to locate “secrets.” These stairs, caves, and the like are hidden behind indistinguishable spots all over the world that need to be bombed or “flamed” open. Inside are various powerups, vendors, quest items, and even dungeons. How the hell any “real” player (unaided) is supposed to find these? I have no idea. Today, in the age of the internet, one just uses a handy guide like this one. But in the 80s? We had to rely on Nintendo Power Magazine! This was one of Ninetendo’s dirty marketing tricks back then. Pretty much, to play these games, you had to have the right issue of Nintendo Power (with its dedicated hint guides). They used to sell millions of issues a month! I also read that  producer and all around genius Shigeru Miyamoto wanted to create a game in which players had to “communicate and collaborate.” Well, I guess he did.

A typical dungeon room

A typical dungeon room. Features: top door locked until all monsters are dead, left door locked with key, right wall busted open with bomb, boomerang hurling enemies

The dungeons are where most of the real difficulty is. Dying here brings you back to the start, but you keep anything you have acquired. Bombed out walls stay bombed, but monsters often/sometimes respawn. The problem is, you  have to chose between slogging through another try with three hearts or heading out into the world to farm hearts, which will result in full respawns inside the dungeon. Later in the game judicious purchases of healing food and help here. Enemy difficulty is highly variable and while it does progress as you move through the game, it isn’t linear. Certain nasties like the Darknuts (can only be hit from behind/side) and the ghosts are far harder than others. The Like-Likes are positively mean, as they can steal your shield. Different rooms have different combinations and some can be quite frustrating (lots of Darknuts at the same time as fireball spitters!). Each dungeon has 1-2 magic items to acquire plus a compass and a map (which help fill in that screen in the upper left). At the end is a final boss, another heart container, and part of the “Triforce” (which although triangular, contains 8 pieces, so perhaps “Octforce” would have been a better name).

This hydra boss is typical

This hydra boss is typical

Each dungeon has a boss at the end. Each is seemingly difficult but usually possesses a “weakness” that while not always obvious, makes them fairly trivial. Some are vulnerable at different times or to different weapons (usually found in their own dungeon). This hydra guy above is more technique based, you have to strike each head 2-4 times (without getting hit by the fireballs). The earlier heads will “spin off” and attack you (just dodge them). Killing the last head will slay it. Basically, it’s all about the dodge and strike. Some bosses return in later dungeons as “sub bosses” with slightly different traits.

This about sums up the plot

This about sums up the plot

The game is light on plot: reassemble the Triforce, rescue the Princess Zelda, and save Hyrule. Better barely no plot than a dumb one that rubs itself in your face! Some of the messages along the way include bonus misspellings courtesy of their translation from the Japanese. Oh so fun!

All in all, Zelda remains intensely playable. While it might be a fairly frustrating at times, it’s never so hard that putting it aside for a couple hours doesn’t lead to immediate progress on returning. This is a pretty big game with a ton of variety, and it’s all packed into 128kb!! Yeah, that’s right, about the size of one highly compressed small internet jpeg ! Code, music, art, everything. And it was a big cart at the time, costing around $90-100 1986 dollars! Now it’s about the size of the average email in my inbox. There is even a “second quest” in which you can replay the game with a slightly different layout and higher difficulty.

Awesome game and a seminal mark in the history of the fantasy RPG. Even WOW owes a debt to Zelda.

My 5 year-old son Alex would like to offer his own review (typed completely verbatim):

When you play Legend of Zelda you go to a first dungeon, a second dungeon, a third dungeon, a fourth dungeon, a fifth dungeon, a sixth dungeon, a seventh dungeon, an eighth dungeon, a ninth dungeon and then you win the game. You might run into big bosses and scary Darknuts and ghosts and bats and blobs and bombs. And sometimes you can bomb a secret a door and collect keys and gems and hearts. Watch out to get no hearts or you start all over again. But after you finish the whole game on the nine dungeons you unlock the queen (Princess Zelda). And you won the game!

If you liked this post, follow me at:

My novels: The Darkening Dream and Untimed
or the
video game post depot
or win Crash & Jak giveaways!

Latest hot post: War Stories: Crash Bandicoot

Related posts:

  1. PS2 Memory Lane
  2. Ready Player One
By: agavin
Comments (9)
Posted in: Games
Tagged as: Emulator, Nintendo, Nintendo Entertainment System, OpenEmu, The Legend of Zelda, Video game

Crash goes to Japan – part 1

Jan11

It’s probably hard for younger gamers to recognize the position in gaming that Japan occupied from the mid eighties to the late 90s. First of all, after video games rose like a phoenix from the “great crash of ’82” (in which the classic coin-op and Atari dominated home market imploded), all major video game machines were from Japan until the arrival of the Xbox. Things were dominated by Nintendo, Sega, Nintendo, Sony, Nintendo, Sony… you get the picture.

And in the days before the home market eclipsed and destroyed the arcade, Japan completely crushed everyone else. Only the occasional US hit like Mortal Kombat even registered on the radar.

Miyamoto, creator of Mario, playing Crash 1. I’m standing behind him off frame

All of this, not to mention the cool samurai/anime culture and ridiculously yummy food (see my sushi index!), made us American video game creators pretty much all Miyamoto groupies.

But on the flip side, American games, if they even made it to the land of the rising sun at all, almost always flopped.

Japanese taste is different the wisdom went. Special. Foreign games even had a special name over there (which I have no idea how to spell). These “lesser” titles were stocked in a seedy back corner of your typical Japanese game store, near the oddball porn games.

So it was with great enthusiasm and limited expectations that we approached the mutual Naughty Dog, Mark Cerny, and Sony decision that we were going to take  the Japanese market really seriously with Crash. Sony assigned two brilliant and dedicated producers to us: Shuhei Yoshida and his then assistant Shimizu (aka Tsurumi-0600). They sat in on every major planning meeting and we scheduled the whole fall for me to localize the game in exacting detail (while we were simultaneously beginning work on Crash 2!).

For the most part, Yoshida-san made things happen and Shimizu, who has literally played like every video game ever made and read like every manga, worked the details. I (with a bunch of help from the artists) had to put in the changes.

Yoshida-san front and center, Shimizu on the far left, Rio (joined the team during Crash 2) on the far right

Somehow Yoshida-san was able to maneuver the game into being not one of those funny foreign games, but an official bona fide release of Sony Computer Entertainment, Inc. the first party Japanese studio. And it was to be sold and marketed pretty much like it had been made in Japan! Wow!

So to pull off this cultural masquerade Jason and I decided that Shu (as Yoshida-san was affectionately known) and Shimizu got pretty much whatever they wanted. They after all, knew the mysterious Japanese market. Which turned out to be pretty darn true. And, besides, both are really really smart and crazy hard workers (Shimizu is famous for sleeping under his desk) and so we all got along famously.

The gameplay itself wasn’t really too much of an issue. Shimizu did help us smooth out some sections and make them easier (often by adding extra continue points − opposite of Europe). But there were a lot of other changes.

The Crash 1 main titles, in Japanese

First of all, we had to translate the text. Some of this wasn’t so bad. But the main logo was a 3D object and Jason had to painstakingly create a version of the paper design the Japanese provided us — which required lots of checking from Shimizu as he doesn’t speak Japanese.

Above is the opening in Japanese.

And things got even harder (for me) with the in game text. The Playstation didn’t have a lot of video memory and we were using a medium resolution 512 pixel wide mode anyway. What little there was, we had pretty much consumed. But the Japanese language has four alphabets! One is Latin, two are similar but different looking phonetic alphabets, and the last is the giant Kanji pictographic database. Kanji would’ve been impossible, but we needed to cram the two extra phonetic sets in. Plus the characters are more intricate than the Latin alphabet and need more pixels. I can’t remember what I did to squeeze them in, but I do remember it was painful. One part I do recall was implementing the sets of letters that vary only by an extra dot or ” mark by drawing them with two sprites (hence saving video ram).

Once the font was installed we had to input the crazy looking “shift JIS” text. One of the problems in those days was that the text editors all 8-bit, unlike today were 16-bit typesets dominate. And with a European language you can usually tell if a line of text had gotten swapped or mangled, but in Japanese… and even worse, in shift JIS it just looks like a bunch of garbage characters.

So again, Shimizu had to check everything. A lot.

Our opening and closing cut scene dialog was recorded in Japanese using very high profile Japanese actors (so they told me). We replaced those audio files (using one of my automated systems of course!). There were also a good number of cases throughout the game where we had placed text in textures. The configuration screens, loading screens, load/save screens and all sorts of other ones. These all needed new versions. We collected all of these textures, shipped them out to Japan and got back Shimizu certified versions in exactly the same sizes with the Japanese text. I used and upgraded the system that I had built for the European version so that any file (texture, audio, etc) in the game could be “replaced” by a file of the same name in the same directory with a .J on the end (or a .S, .E, .F, .G, .I for various European permutations). The level packaging tool would automatically suck up the most appropriate version and shove it in the J versions of the levels. I’m not sure we left ANYTHING untranslated. Even Japanese games usually had more Engrish. Achem, English. I so remember a Castlevania with “Dlacura’s grave.”

Then the Japanese came up with this idea of having Aku Aku explain various gameplay mechanics to you when you break his boxes, much like the raspberry boxes in Super Mario World. This was a great idea, except it meant that the game was suddenly filled with about 200 extra paragraphs of text. Undecipherable text. I had to squeeze that into the levels too. More problematic was the seemingly simple fact that when a big block of text comes up on the screen the game effectively needs to pause so the player can read it. You can’t just “hit pause” but need a separate state. This simple feature caused a lot of bugs. A lot. But we stomped them out eventually.

Above you can see a walk through of the first level. A lot of the PITA localization work was in the save screens (big fun: character entry screen in three Japanese alphabets) and the various statistic screens at the end of the level. I think the Japanese allowed us to do away with the horrible password system and use memory card only.

The Japanese box and CD with its very strange Crash and Eve painting — it was nice and colorful

The Japanese also had some famous actor record a whole collection of really zany sounding grunts and noises that Crash was to make. Shimizu lovingly crafted long lists of extremely specific places in the game where exactly such and such exclamation was to be uttered. He was never one to spare either of us from a great deal of work 🙂 But his willingness to tackle any task himself, no matter how tedious, made him hard to refuse. I also had to squeeze all these extra samples into the extremely tight sound memory, mostly by downgrading the bit-rate on other sounds. This caused Mike Gollom, our awesome sound design contractor to groan and moan. “3.5k is pure butchery” he’d complain. I found this SGI tool that used a really advanced new algorithm to downgrade the sounds, they sounded twice as good at any given bit-rate than the Sony tool.

Anyway the really funny bit about these Crash sounds was the subjective feel they left us Americans with. Strange! They made Crash sound like a constipated old man. But the Japanese insisted they were perfect. I guess they were right because the game sold like crazy over there.

Another weird audio difference was that five of the songs were swapped out for new ones. Josh Mancell the composer put it this way:

An 11th hour decision made by the Sony people in Japan. They felt that the boss rounds needed to sound more ‘video game-like’. The only reference they gave was music from the Main Street Electrical Parade at Disneyland. I only had a day or so to write all those themes. My favorite comment was about the original Tawna bonus round music. It roughly translated into ‘the sound of the guitar mixed with the tree imagery is too nostalgic-sounding’. I’m still scratching my head on that one.

You can find the different tracks here.

There were also a host of minor but strange modifications we needed to make. One was that a few characters originally had four fingers, which is typical of most American cartoon characters. Apparently the Japanese have a more than usual dislike of disfigured humanoids. Fingers were added (to make them the normal five). There were a whole bunch of little visual, audio, and gameplay changes Shimizu had us make to the game. Most of these I felt were neutral, different but not really better or worse, so I just trusted him and put them in. Occasionally if they were a really pain I pushed back.

Eventually, right around Thanksgiving, just in time for Jason and I to head to Japan to promote it, the Japanese version was ready!

Coming soon, I plan on a part 2 covering Japanese marketing and promotions!

If you didn’t catch it, I have a similar detailed post in the European localization of Crash.

If you liked this post, follow me at:

My novels: The Darkening Dream and Untimed
or the
video game post depot
or win Crash & Jak giveaways!

Latest hot post: War Stories: Crash Bandicoot

Cover of the hint guide in Japan

Related posts:

  1. Crash Bandicoot – An Outsider’s Perspective (part 8)
  2. Parlez vous Crash
  3. Making Crash Bandicoot – part 5
  4. Making Crash Bandicoot – part 1
  5. Making Crash Bandicoot – part 2
By: agavin
Comments (141)
Posted in: Games
Tagged as: Atari, Crash Bandicoot, Japan, Japanese Localization, Mark Cerny, Mortal Kombat, Naughty Dog, Nintendo, pt_crash_history, Sega, Shimizu, Shuhei Yoshida, Sony, Sony Computer Entertainment, Super Mario World, Video game, Xbox

Making Crash Bandicoot – part 2

Feb03

CONTINUED FROM PART 1 ABOVE.

So what was it that Sega and Nintendo had in 1994, but Sony didn’t?

An existing competing mascot character. Sega had Sonic and Nintendo had Mario (even if the N64 was just a rumor at that point). But Sony product slate was blank.

So we set about creating a mascot on the theory that maybe, just maybe, we might be able to slide into that opening. I’m still surprised it worked.

The first real Crash

Next we had to find a creature to hang our hopes on. We wanted to do what Sega had done with the hedgehog and Warner Bros had done with the Tasmanian Devil and find some kind of animal that was cute, real, and no one really knew about. We bought a copy of “Tasmanian Mammals – a field guide” and flipped through. The Wombat, Potoroo, and Bandicoot fit the bill. For the meantime we went with Willie the Wombat, as both Jason and I like alliteration. We never considered it a real name as it was too dorky. And just a month or so later someone told us about some other non-game property with the same name, so it remained a working title. By October 1994 the character was a Bandicoot as far as we were concerned.  We loved the word, but we kept calling him Willie, and the game Willie the Wombat until spring of 1996. It wasn’t really worth it to sort out a final name – some marketing department would probably change it anyway.

In September and October of 1994 we were busy trying to figure out who this Willie guy was. We felt he should be goofy and fun loving, and never talk — on the theory that voices for video game characters were always lame, negative, and distracted from identification with them.

But the villain gelled faster than the hero.

Dr. Neo Cortex — pissed

I remember it clearly. The four of us were eating at this mediocre Italian near Universal and I had this idea of an evil genius villain with a big head. Obviously brainy cartoon villains have big heads. He was all about his attitude and his minions. Video games need lots of minions. Jason had become very fond of Pinky and the Brain and we imagined a more malevolent Brain with minions like the weasels in Who Framed Roger Rabbit. A villain, all full of himself, unable to conceive of ever doing anything the simple way, but constantly (in his eyes) betrayed by the incompetence of his henchmen.

I put on my silly villain voice and intoned, “If you had three neurons between you, you couldn’t make a triangle!” With this attitude, his name, Doctor Neo Cortex, popped instantly into our heads.

For “Willie” was to be – in our minds – a game that tried to combine the game play of Mario or Donkey Kong Country with the animation and cartoon sensibility of a Looney Tunes or Tex Avery cartoon.

To that effect, we took the very unusual step of hiring real “Hollywood” cartoon designers to help with the visual part of the production. This was Mark’s idea at first, although Jason and I saw the brilliance of it immediately. In those days we were enamored with the idea blending the best of Hollywood into game making – creative synergy if you will. In the long run, we would be disabused of much of the synergy notion. However, production design, sound design, voice acting, and later motion capture, were to be the areas in which Hollywood resources proved valuable to video game teams.

A Crash that wasn’t

The guys we brought on were Charles Zembillas and Joe Pearson. Charles was principally character, and Joe background. These two were instrumental in developing the look of Crash Bandicoot, particularly prior to us hiring Bob Rafei in January 1995. Bob was an extremely talented young artist who would eventually come to head the art design at Naughty Dog. But in 1994, what Charles and Joe did was provide the fleshing out, or visualization, of ideas pitched mostly by Jason, myself, or Mark. In essence, they translated into cartoon sensibility.

Charles in particular was a very fast sketch artist, with a real knack for capturing cartoon emotion. So we would just say things like, “Cortex has a huge head but a tiny body, he’s a mad scientist, and he dresses a bit like a Nazi from the Jetsons” and in 2 minutes he’d have a gray and blue pencil sketch. We might then say, “less hair, goofier, crazier” and he’d do another sketch. Repeat.

The jungle, concept

Joe did the same for the backgrounds, but as landscapes have more lines, on a slightly longer time scale. Given that “Willie” was Tasmanian we set him on a mysterious island where every possible kind of environment lurked. Evil geniuses like Dr. Cortex require island strongholds. So we had lots of environments to design. Jungles, power stations, creepy castles, evil natives, sunset temples, spooky caves, etc. At some point early on we hit on the “tiki” idea and thus: goofy Easter Island tikis everywhere.

 

Jason’s comments:

When we started designing Crash, or Willie as he was first known internally, we decided that there need be no connection between the real animal and the final design — hey, all mammals, uh marsupials.  A Wombat looks nothing like Crash.  He is closer to a Bandicoot, maybe, but that was pure luck.  Instead the design of the character was determined 51% by technical and visual necessity and 49% by inspiration.

A (very) partial list of the Necessities:

Why is Crash Orange?  Not because we liked it, but because it made the most sense.  First I created a list of popular characters and their colors.  Next I made a list of earthly background possibilities (forest, desert, beach, etc.) and then we strictly outlawed colors that didn’t look good on the screen.  Red, for example, tends to bleed horribly on old televisions.  At the time, everyone had old televisions, even if they were new!  Crash was orange because that was available.  There are no lava levels, a staple in character action games, because Crash is orange.  We made one in Demo, and that ended the lava debate.  It was not terribly dissimilar to trying to watch a black dog run in the yard on a moonless night.

Why is Crash’s face so large?  Because the resolution of the screen was so low.  Some people think we were inspired by the Tasmanian devil.  Perhaps, but it was the necessity of having features large enough to be discernable that caused us to push for the neckless look.  The move made it a little harder to turn his head, and created a very unique way of moving, but it let you see Crash’s facial expressions.  And that was to be very important.

Why does Crash have gloves, spots on his back, and a light colored chest?  Resolution, bad lighting models, and low polygon counts.  Those small additions let you quickly determine what part and rotation of Crash you were looking at based on color.  If you saw spots, it was his back.  Yellowish orange was the front.  As the hands and arms crossed the body during a run the orange tended to blend into muck.  But your eyes tracked the black gloves as they crossed Crash’s body and your mind filled in the rest.

We were wrestling with these design constraints the entire process.  Joe and Charles, with all their talent, were free to do anything that they could imagine on paper.  But Bob and I were the artists that eventually had to ground that back in the reality of calculator strapped to a TV that was the PlayStation 1.

Charles would hand us a sketch and we would start the math:  240 pixel high screen, character 1/6 to 1/4 of the screen height, character 40 to 60 pixels high, proposed hat 1/8 of height of Character, hat 5 to 6 pixels high, hat has stripes.  Striped hat won’t work because the stripes will be less than 1 pixel high.

Take the image Andy posted titled “A Crash that Wasn’t.”  I can tell you immediately that the tail and any kind of flappy strap was immediately shot down because it would have flickered on and off as the PlayStation failed to have pixels to show it.  And that little bit of ankle showing beneath the long pants would have been an annoying orange flicker every few frames around the bottom of his pants and shoes.  Shorter pants would have to prevail.  Crash did end up with a belly button, but it would be about 2x as big.

The first sketches of Crash as we know him

Charles would look at us like we were speaking Swahili.  But then he’d go off and draw something totally cool and all would be well.

Cortex had few of these issues.  We could make him totally improbable, un-animatable, and just keep him bigger on the screen.   He didn’t show up too often anyway.  He could never really walk with those short legs.  He had to do a weird thrusting tra-la-la dance.  But he looked cool so we just kept him stationary most of the time.

Cortex was my favorite.  I think Andy preferred Crash.  They fit our differing personalities!  Andy has the original ink Crash sketches and I have the original Cortexes.  Both are a true testament to Charles Zembillas’ skill as a character designer. [ NOTE from Andy: I love both, but I too have a secret fondness for my brainchild — he’s just funnier, and he takes himself way too seriously to ever dress in drag. ]

 

CONTINUED HERE WITH PART 3 HERE or

If you liked this post, follow me at:

My novels: The Darkening Dream and Untimed
or the
video game post depot
or win Crash & Jak giveaways!

Latest hot post: War Stories: Crash Bandicoot

Caves, concept

Castle Cortex

Related posts:

  1. Making Crash Bandicoot – part 1
  2. How do I get a job designing video games?
  3. On Writing: Passes and Plots
By: agavin
Comments (94)
Posted in: Games
Tagged as: Andy Gavin, Bob Rafei, Character Action Games, Character Design, Charles Zembillas, Crash Bandicoot, Doctor Neo Cortex, Games, Jason Rubin, Joe Pearson, Mark Cerny, Nintendo, Playstation, pt_crash_history, Sega, Sony, Tex Avery, Video game, Video Games, Who Framed Roger Rabbit
Watch the Trailer or

Buy it Online!

Buy it Online!

96 of 100 tickets!

Find Andy at:

Follow Me on Pinterest

Subscribe by email:

More posts on:



Complete Archives

Categories

  • Contests (7)
  • Fiction (404)
    • Books (113)
    • Movies (77)
    • Television (123)
    • Writing (115)
      • Darkening Dream (62)
      • Untimed (37)
  • Food (1,481)
  • Games (100)
  • History (13)
  • Technology (21)
  • Uncategorized (16)

Recent Posts

  • OOToro Double
  • Robo Eats – Anarbagh
  • Fred loves N/Naka
  • Major Major Major
  • Far East – Beijing Tasty House
  • Home Sweet Spicy Home
  • Quick Eats – Bafang
  • Quick Eats – Peking Restaurant
  • Quick Eats – MK BBQ
  • Wolfing it Down

Favorite Posts

  • I, Author
  • My Novels
  • The Darkening Dream
  • Sample Chapters
  • Untimed
  • Making Crash Bandicoot
  • My Gaming Career
  • Getting a job designing video games
  • Getting a job programming video games
  • Buffy the Vampire Slayer
  • A Game of Thrones
  • 27 Courses of Truffles
  • Ultimate Pizza
  • Eating Italy
  • LA Sushi
  • Foodie Club

Recent Comments

Archives

  • March 2023 (9)
  • February 2023 (11)
  • January 2023 (14)
  • December 2022 (11)
  • November 2022 (13)
  • October 2022 (14)
  • September 2022 (14)
  • August 2022 (12)
  • July 2022 (9)
  • June 2022 (6)
  • May 2022 (8)
  • April 2022 (5)
  • March 2022 (4)
  • February 2022 (2)
  • January 2022 (8)
  • December 2021 (6)
  • November 2021 (6)
  • October 2021 (8)
  • September 2021 (4)
  • August 2021 (5)
  • July 2021 (2)
  • June 2021 (3)
  • January 2021 (1)
  • December 2020 (1)
  • September 2020 (1)
  • August 2020 (1)
  • April 2020 (11)
  • March 2020 (15)
  • February 2020 (13)
  • January 2020 (14)
  • December 2019 (13)
  • November 2019 (12)
  • October 2019 (14)
  • September 2019 (14)
  • August 2019 (13)
  • July 2019 (13)
  • June 2019 (14)
  • May 2019 (13)
  • April 2019 (10)
  • March 2019 (10)
  • February 2019 (11)
  • January 2019 (13)
  • December 2018 (14)
  • November 2018 (11)
  • October 2018 (15)
  • September 2018 (15)
  • August 2018 (15)
  • July 2018 (11)
  • June 2018 (14)
  • May 2018 (13)
  • April 2018 (13)
  • March 2018 (17)
  • February 2018 (12)
  • January 2018 (15)
  • December 2017 (15)
  • November 2017 (13)
  • October 2017 (16)
  • September 2017 (16)
  • August 2017 (16)
  • July 2017 (11)
  • June 2017 (13)
  • May 2017 (6)
  • March 2017 (3)
  • February 2017 (4)
  • January 2017 (7)
  • December 2016 (14)
  • November 2016 (11)
  • October 2016 (11)
  • September 2016 (12)
  • August 2016 (15)
  • July 2016 (13)
  • June 2016 (13)
  • May 2016 (13)
  • April 2016 (12)
  • March 2016 (13)
  • February 2016 (12)
  • January 2016 (13)
  • December 2015 (14)
  • November 2015 (14)
  • October 2015 (13)
  • September 2015 (13)
  • August 2015 (18)
  • July 2015 (16)
  • June 2015 (13)
  • May 2015 (13)
  • April 2015 (14)
  • March 2015 (15)
  • February 2015 (13)
  • January 2015 (13)
  • December 2014 (14)
  • November 2014 (13)
  • October 2014 (13)
  • September 2014 (12)
  • August 2014 (15)
  • July 2014 (13)
  • June 2014 (13)
  • May 2014 (14)
  • April 2014 (14)
  • March 2014 (10)
  • February 2014 (11)
  • January 2014 (13)
  • December 2013 (14)
  • November 2013 (13)
  • October 2013 (14)
  • September 2013 (12)
  • August 2013 (14)
  • July 2013 (10)
  • June 2013 (14)
  • May 2013 (14)
  • April 2013 (14)
  • March 2013 (15)
  • February 2013 (14)
  • January 2013 (13)
  • December 2012 (14)
  • November 2012 (16)
  • October 2012 (13)
  • September 2012 (14)
  • August 2012 (16)
  • July 2012 (12)
  • June 2012 (16)
  • May 2012 (21)
  • April 2012 (18)
  • March 2012 (20)
  • February 2012 (23)
  • January 2012 (31)
  • December 2011 (35)
  • November 2011 (33)
  • October 2011 (32)
  • September 2011 (29)
  • August 2011 (35)
  • July 2011 (33)
  • June 2011 (25)
  • May 2011 (31)
  • April 2011 (30)
  • March 2011 (34)
  • February 2011 (31)
  • January 2011 (33)
  • December 2010 (33)
  • November 2010 (39)
  • October 2010 (26)
All Things Andy Gavin
Copyright © 2023 All Rights Reserved
Programmed by Andy Gavin