(There was talk at the time that the artists needed therapy due to this, but we call bull on that one…) One of the most bizarre was Darkseed, which featured two worlds: ours, and a Dark World based on the biomechanical paintings of HR Geiger. In adventures, we saw everything from the pure cartoon style of Day of the Tentacle to photographic/3D rendered hybrids in the likes of Lost in Time, to early attempts to put real people into the mix during the horrific age of interactive movies. NO FUN: We'd scream too if our world was made up of such clashing styles Free of the constraints of flat colours and simple shapes, developers jumped at the chance to create unique worlds. It was an era of mixed media, with classic animation sitting alongside revolutionary new ideas. It was jarring, but consistent.Īll of this gave the early 90s a fascinating look. These included Prince of Persia with its rotoscoped character animations, and Tex Murphy, which avoided having 2D versions of its characters in the 3D game world wherever possible, and simply cut to a full-on blue-screened FMV sequence for conversations and important actions. The only games that made the leap successfully simply used the original footage as a starting point, rather than trying to implement it into the game as-was. Rendered 3D figures suffered from these problems as well, but rarely to such a degree. Low resolutions turned them into a blurry mess and higher resolutions hammered home how badly the non-antialiased sprites sat in the world.Īs just one example, an FMV character will always have more superfluous detail than a cartoon one, leading to more obvious problems if their walk cycles get broken - frequently making it harder to read body language. One media mix that never worked well in this context was FMV, partly due to the often woeful production values of the games that used it, but mostly because of issues with converting footage into something that could be used as a game sprite.

Many games were quite happy to chop and change media types on the fly, whether by kicking off with a 3D rendered introduction (as in King's Quest VI, Syndicate and almost every early CD game), or showing detailed pictures of characters in conversations. This was primarily a logistical issue, given the number of animation frames that would have to be stored and created, but few minded. It quickly became acceptable to have different styles for the overlaid characters, typically keeping them cartoony, regardless of their settings. Interestingly, this usually only applied to the backgrounds.

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