Pixel Counterrr

As long as I remember, I have had this particular fondness toward arcade games (and I mean the actual coin-operated ones), especially when growing up. Obviously we are now living in the post-arcade era where sophisticated home systems made arcades finally obsolete, but fortunately at least classic arcade games continue to live on through collectors and, of course, emulation.

What made arcade games so special back then was that they offered, in a way, a window into the future of consumer real-time imagery, as in, what could be possible in home environment somewhere down the line. In fact, for me they acted like windows quite literally since I rarely had resources to actually play the games, but awkwardly hang around them. Watching other people play was almost equally exciting nevertheless, which made me a rather lousy customer for the local arcade as a juvenile.

Even though arcade games by and large came from a variety of developers, one publisher was and, in a way, still is in a league of its own: Sega, and particularly the Sega AM2 team led by design genius Yu Suzuki. I’ve yet to encounter an entity that has broken ground in video game graphics as ambitiously as Sega has, with games that continuously redefined what the real-time image can do.

The closest games to my heart out of the Sega’s overwhelming portfolio are the ones released in the 80s using so-called Super Scaler technology. These are the titles that simulate 3D space by algorithmically scaling the bitmap art assets creating an illusion of traversing along the z-axis. The effect was nothing short of staggering and light years ahead what home systems could do at the time. Games, like Out Run (1986), After Burner (1987) and Thunder Blade (1988), to name but a few, all used this Super Scaler system, and the whole charm of them, I would argue, was ultimately reduced to the smooth scaling effect.

As said, the above-mentioned arcade games ­represented the absolute high-end of the gaming spectrum at the time. The commercial success of them naturally created financial pressures to bring the arcade experience to the home systems, such as the Commodore 64, as well. The problem was, that the C64 represented virtually the direct opposite end of the spectrum with its lackluster hardware in terms of screen resolution, color palette and computational horsepower in general.

Of course, that didn’t stop money-grabbing publishers, such as Ocean and U.S.Gold, bringing Out Run and the likes to the low-end home systems. The issue was that, for instance, Out Run was not so much about the gameplay per se, but the spectacle of driving smoothly through the colorful scenery filled with eye pleasing details. When those things were stripped off in the low-end versions, such as the one on the C64, there wasn’t that much, if anything, conveyed from the original experience anymore due to the hardware limitations. All that there was left was a really bad game, even by the C64 standards.

The original Out Run was indeed a rock-solid fusion of software and hardware that carried through the visual concept Out Run was built on gracefully with no hiccups whatsoever. The game ran beautifully at high and steady frame rates, contained striking transition effects when driving from one section to the next one, and offered vast variation in terms of visuals in general. I’d say Out Run was best the year 1986 had to offer for real-time imagery which the everyday audience had access to.

However, the way the C64 version was constructed was completely backward. The exercise here was to shove the concept of Out Run into the system in any way possible regardless the inherent hardware limitations. There was indeed nothing – not a single chip – inside the C64 that would’ve warranted or justified the ludicrous idea of porting a game like Out Run to such a weak system. Which is painfully obvious just by glancing at the end result, especially in motion.

In the end, everything comes down to the fact that the real-time image as a medium can’t be separated from the hardware platform that it’s on; the real-time image is the software and the hardware. I can only imagine the level of disappointment of someone who actually paid real money for an arcade conversion like the C64’s Out Run and thought having nearly the same arcade experience at home. It was like buying Star Wars: Episode IV on DVD and getting Star Wars Uncut instead.

It goes without saying that in the end the logic of such endeavors had got to do more than anything with the power of Intellectual Property and the “fraudulent” financial leverage that came along with it. In fact, all this makes me think of fast food joints where the pictures of the burgers above the counter represent nothing of the actual products people are shoving, rather happily, into their faces. What they are doing is consuming the simulacrum of the Big Mac, not the Bic Mac depicted in the marketing materials.

The problem of horrible arcade conversions wasn’t the poor target hardware in and of itself. There were quite beautiful games on the C64 at the time, like, for instance, Uridium (1986) that utilized even the awkward shape of the C64 pixels for its advantage. The problem was the completely backward and corrupt creative process. And I’m using the term creative very loosely here.

The younger audience of today is probably having hard time comprehending the concept of sprite that pretty much defined real-time imagery for more than a decade or so between the 80s and 90s. Sure, we do still use the term to denote planar 2D images representing 3D objects in a 3D space, but it has a very different meaning today than back in the day.

In the era of 8 and 16 bit systems, like the Commodore 64, Super Nintendo or Neo Geo, sprite denoted specifically an independent, dynamic visual object (like a space ship or a race car) of which properties, such as size and number, related directly to the capabilities of a certain piece of hardware. So, for instance, the C64 could display no more than 8 sprites at a time which paled in comparison to the 96 sprites the more advanced Neo Geo was able to push to the screen at once. Put simply, sprites were Lego-like building blocks for the dynamic elements of the game, and very much of the visual outcome depended on them, whether one liked it or not.

As said, not only the number of simultaneous sprites varied between the systems, but so did the sizes of them as well. That is, how many pixels one sprite could consist of in maximum, which was relatively few in lower-end systems, such as the C64. This limitation made larger game characters and other dynamic objects that more fascinating at the time, even if the assets usually consisted of several sub-sprites to make an impression of a one large one.

An iconic example in my mind is The Way of the Exploding Fist (1985) originally developed on the C64 that was, in addition to the great gameplay, celebrated indeed for its seemingly massive characters, which, of course, consisted of a number of separate sprites. Nevertheless, the size of the characters in and of themselves bore so much aesthetic value that the technical side was secondary: big was big was big.

Since the fascination of real-time imagery is very much based on the recognition of technical limitations and, at the same time, pushing that envelope of what is considered possible, it’s not coincidence that some games, especially the ones released on the launch of a new hardware platform, exploit this frame of thinking. The thing is, there is this short post-launch window within which a game can make an impression employing merely the basic features of the freshly released platform.

One instance that comes to mind is Super Mario World (1990) that came bundled with the Super Nintendo as a launch title. So, I believe the sole reason why there was a huge Bullet Bill, aka Banzai Bill, right at the first level was indeed to impress new console owners, or people playing at stores, with the power of the SNES. And since the sizes of game characters were highly limited in the previous generation of hardware, it was only natural to put an oversized version of an already established character to mediate the point across: Kids, we can have this big Bullet Bills from now on.

It was the inevitable decline of sprite-based hardware that made the issue of size obsolete in the realm of real-time imagery. Once everything was constructed with polygons, the dimensions of art assets became totally relative, and thus a non-issue technically speaking. Which seems to escape people who marvel, say, God of War III (2010) as a technological achievement for its colossal characters. I can too scale up a 3D model in a 3D software environment as much as I please and technically it makes no difference whatsoever.

If, then, one “superficial” attribute has to be singled out that bears any technical meaning in art assets today, it’s definition instead of size.

Drawing with the Commodore 64’s classic Koala Painter wasn’t the easiest task to do; joystick as an input, lots of crashes, pixels as big as Lego-bricks, and not to mention, a highly limited color palette. In fact, everything else was somewhat tolerable and forgivable, even the crashing if you just knew what procedures to avoid, but you just couldn’t get around with the poor amount of colors that was available. And because the resolution was equally poor, rasterization techniques were essentially ruled out from the get-go due to the hideous results.

Luckily, color palette has since then increased steadily from C64’s 16 colors, to modern hardware’s millions of colors. What this transition has caused by and large is that the number of colors has become basically a non-issue in contemporary mainstream real-time imagery discourse, as if the whole project of colors would be concluded. And it essentially is, since the 16,7 million color palette has been a consumer standard for years now, and obviously “good enough” for majority of people.

So, I started to think what else has come to its evolutionary end in the realm of real-time imagery, and one instance I could think of was screen resolution. I’m highly skeptical that there will be a demand for higher than 2560 x 1440 resolution (which is the resolution of a typical 27” display for professional use) in near future, since even 1920 × 1080 (Full HD) has been something of a gold-standard for quite some time. And bigger resolutions would entail bigger displays, which is hard to imagine happening in home environment for logistical reasons alone, given the enormous physical size of today’s flat-screen TVs.

Ok, I really didn’t see the iPhone 4’s Retina Display coming, but I guess only few of us did. The Retina Display’s resolution is far beyond the reasonable need, so it’s rather safe to declare that the pixel-density has now officially hit the ceiling, or at least is about to hit in the very near future.

As said, color palette and resolution haven’t been issues for a while now, which gives rise to the question when do we have, for instance, enough onscreen polygons ? Or when lighting is “good enough”? Perhaps I’m comparing apples to oranges here, since palette and resolution are more directly dependent on the technical features of hardware, than number of polygons or quality of shadows. Still, it would make sense that there will be a day when we aren’t anymore discussing polygons or shadows per se, but solely the artistic use of them. The technical discourse becomes obsolete.

In a way, I really don’t want to see that day, since the chase is always better than the catch.