Its president Hiroshi Yamauchi revised its plans when he realized that his company whouldn’t be able to produce enough titles to sustain the demand and that a growing number of publishers were already showing interest in developing for the Famicom.
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While every developer was free to commercialize games on computer, Nintendo originally had the intent of being the sole publisher on its console. When the Famicom hit the shelves in July 1983, the concept of third publisher was known of only a few people in Japan -the Atari 2600 launched about the same time as Nintendo’s console on this market and didn’t make a big splash there. I can still remember what a relief it was switching to those new systems… it was so much easier than before!” Again, it’s very close to how we do things today. We also started using specialized graphic tools at this time: no more drawing on graph paper! Now you sat at a monitor and used a keyboard to change colors and so forth. Although many graphic designers have fond memories of the 2D era, few of them seem to regret the transition to a more direct approach: “ I was the main background designer for T.A.N.K (SNK, 1985), recalls Toshiyuki Nakai. Using the hexadecimal system contributed to save ROM space by minimizing the size of the graphical data at a time when it was very expensive.
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It’s only after passing these steps that the designer could see his work displayed on the screen and sometimes feel the need to reiterate the whole process in case of mistake or unsatisfying rendering.Ĭharacters from Namco’s arcade game Pac-Man (1980) drawn on grid paper, followed by an excerpt of the game code in hexadecimal
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And then after you coloured those individual squares, you would convert them in to numbers, and then you would key in the numbers in hexadecimal using a ROM writer”. Michitaka Tsuruta, who studied animation in school and later designed Solomon’s Key, joined Tehkan in 1982 and used that system in the early years of his career: “ You would color in the squares on graph paper.
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The people in charge of graphic design in those days needed 3 things: grid paper, a computer with a keyboard and basic knowledge of hexadecimal. The Japanese industry would start to use graphic editors only years later. You could draw with a computer, but saving what was displayed on the screen wasn’t without its problems, hence the fact that 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.Ĭomputers from the old days were designed in such a way that they were de facto intended for people who were knowledgeable about programming and mathematics. 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. 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. Regarding graphic design, it was pretty much the same: there was almost one kind of setting per company in Japan. 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.
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Unity and Unreal Engine, most of those companies were used to develop their own engines before that. It took years for the Japanese industry to start adopting commercial engines such as From the late 80s to the early 90s, these 3 tools were at the core of numerous graphic designers’ workstations in the West.