The Making of Mortal Kombat | Digitized graphics in video games

arcade boards were evolving rapidly during the 80s the higher resolution and expanding color palettes quickly demanded dedicated pixel artists and tools the japanese companies were getting ahead of the game in producing state-of-the-art pixel graphics meanwhile an important trend in computer graphics was just starting digital imaging editing digitized images via computer software jack hager one of the pioneers of williams arcade division found himself working to launch the amiga hosting a live demonstration in 1985 in which andy warhol painted on a digitized portrait of debbie harry using the paint application propane hager left a year later to rejoin williams along with the two other arcade pioneers eugene jarvis from defender and robotron fame and cubert co-creator warren davis the three men were tasked to revitalize the once successful williams video game branch they embraced the concept of using digitized graphics to rival the pixel art of japanese developers by 1986 it was a bold concept as digital imaging was still in its infancy they had to set up a workflow from scratch using what limited hardware and tools were available in addition to creating their own by the mid-80s simple paint applications for desktop systems were plentiful but when it came to digital imaging the gap between high-end systems and the desktop market was still huge the high-end quantal paint box systems gave the artist in the broadcast and advertising industry the power to manipulate full-color digitized image from live feeds not having a million dollar budget to afford these the williams crew experimented with early photo digitizers like the new tech digi view for the amiga but being developed for consumers to digitize still images it was too slow and cumbersome for a bigger production luckily a more robust solution came around in 1987 att epic center launched their truevision advanced raster graphics adapter better known as targa these high color graphic boards for the pc market could directly digitize images from analog feeds coming from a video camera or tape deck for instance the boards were sold with the versatile truevision image processing package tips on top of that they also came with an sdk which allowed warren davis to write his own image capture software catered toward their needs called wtag the game narc by programmers eugene jarvis and george petro would be williams's first release to make use of their new workflow featuring the two vigilantes max force and hitman with their iconic red porsche shooting their way through thugs and crime lords team members dressed up and were filmed on tape and digitized narc featured over-the-top action and became the origin of their company motto reality is boring williams managed to ship 3000 arcade units combined with their growing success in their pinball division this ignited a recruitment drive after the acquisition of the pinball and arcade division of their longtime competitor williams electronics was officially rebranded to midway the 90s would kick off with an important meeting for the acquisition of the license for terminator 2 midway and their publishing partner acclaim had teamed up on a deal that would involve the rights for a pinball table an arcade game and a video game adaptation of this highly anticipated movie during a meeting in la they pitched their ideas and showed the digitization process behind narc director james cameron who happened to join the meeting was intrigued by the similarities with film production his enthusiasm helped to ease the deal and within a few hours they had already started brainstorming ideas for their games before flying back to chicago the midway crew paid a visit to stan winston's effects studio to study the various t-800 endoskeleton stop-motion puppets back at midway the t-800 model was filmed from numerous poses frame by frame in a simple tabletop photo studio and run through the digitization process [Music] judgment day when principal photography of the feature film started later that year the developers were granted access to the set to shoot their own material which was an industry first between scenes they shot their own footage with arnold schwarzenegger's stunt double linda hamilton's twin sister and two of the main cast members robert patrick and edward furlong warren davis joined the terminator 2 team halfway as senior programmer and created a sophisticated image compression algorithm that allowed them to incorporate short clips from the film in the summer of 1991 when movie going audiences were dazzled by terminator 2 they could relive their experiences with the themed pinball and arcade game acquiring the license proved to be very lucrative for midway while arcade goers relentlessly spent their coins in the light gun game a completely new arcade hit was already in the making when t2 was still in production artist john tobias and programmer ed boone had discussed their ideas for a versus fighting game making full use of the digitizing tech inside the company tobias and boone were part of a new generation of game developers that grew up playing arcade games themselves and formed by the entertainment of the 70s and 80s with video games still being a new industry it was quite common for these young game designers to end up directing their own game projects early on in their careers moulding all their childhood favorites together into unique productions of their own the initial pitch for their project was made to management with the promise of tying in an action star to the project while licensing was trying to secure a deal tobias and boone finished their work on their assigned projects in the coming months although their fighting game had not been officially greenlit it evolved into bios mind as he continued to think of the potential characters he researched books on asian mythology and martial arts history he came across a book describing a cult of assassins from northern china the lin kuei although there's doubt as to whether they ever existed the concept appealed to the designer and was the birth of sub-zero and his japanese ninja counterpart and arch-nemesis scorpio tobias chose to stick to clear archetypes easily identifiable in the player's mind without the need for elaborate backstories they would be a mixture of characters with supernatural powers and more grounded martial artists several months passed before an opportunity arose for the young game designer duo midway's manufacturing department foresaw a gap in their production schedule in the near future to keep the factory running midway quickly needed a new arcade game combined with the massive success of the fighting genre thanks to street fighter 2 this had management green lighting mortal kombat with the premise that it had to be done in six months to portray the stars of the game tobias would call upon the talents of local martial artists who he had wanted to shoot an indie movie with years prior licensing had been unsuccessful in warming celebrity stars to the project but it actually gave the production a great deal of freedom these young martial artists and actors participated in the project with a great deal of enthusiasm and time to dedicate tobias was mindful to keep their costumes composed of a single primary color to make them work in the low resolution with restricted color palette bits and pieces for their outfits came from their collection or were brought in from places like sporting goods stores and costume shops a shared storage space in the back of the pinball manufacturing plant was converted to a simple studio footage was shot with a high eight camcorder a consumer analog eight millimeter tape format that had just been brought onto the market by sony and canon in 1989. in comparison to its predecessor video 8 and vhs high 8 had a much higher luminance resolution this made it a suitable format to capture images for the big sprites they envisioned for their project within a modest budget before putting all characters through the workflow an initial test was done with martial artist daniel pensina the shot material was loaded in the hi-8 deck and connected to the targa board inside the workstation by using the wtag software tobias could capture paused frames to digital files the software reduced the colors using the latest color reduction algorithms images were boosted in contrast and saturation for a more vibrant look and the backgrounds were painstakingly removed frame by frame the edges in particular required a lot of care arcade hardware at the time didn't fully support transparency values per pixel meaning pixels were either fully opaque or transparent tobias had to make the edges of characters work against both bright and dark backgrounds the test shoot greatly helped to figure out what kind of moves would translate best to low resolution sprites tobias and boone made a list of moves for each character the actors helped interpret these in a way that fit their characters as well as sharing their own ideas daniel pensina would then help out on set to further instruct the other actors air attacks were done with the help of a small wooden staircase which gave them the freedom to take the pose they wanted and would also eliminate any motion blur that would otherwise be introduced [Music] artist john vogel joined the team and would work on the game's backgrounds using tobias's sketches as a starting point he filmed various model kits and statues taking into account the direction that light would hit the objects at in particular stages the separate digitized objects were composited in the software package tips to form a single consistent background most of the game's graphical elements were all digitized to fit in with the real world look [Music] programmer ed boon took the digitized assets and started to implement them into the game he had a great grasp on gameplay and envisioned a fast-paced fighter the number of animation frames for attacks were kept to a minimum to make gameplay responsive and reduce the overall memory footprint the feel of the impact is crucial for a fighting game boone made sure the strong blows were communicated to the player through sound and visual cues like screen shake and timing memory chips were still among the most expensive components of the arcade cabinet and thus the team had to find clever workarounds to make the most out of the limited rom space for example boone used the compression algorithm written by warren davis on a large imposing image of goro featured in the attract mode this ray harryhausen inspired boss character had been in tobias's mind from the start he contacted his friend kurt chirelli to sculpt the four-armed brute and handcraft a professional stop-motion puppet tobias did the stop-motion work himself and filmed the puppet in a table studio setup due to the very tight schedule of mortal kombat decisions were often made in production on the spot leading to some unexpected but defining elements ed boon took the image frames meant for final boss shang tsung's beheading sequence and tied them to johnny cage's uppercut at the end of the fight the result was shocking and exciting at the same time and was the birth of the fatality midway had a free spirited atmosphere once management believed in a project they rarely stepped in composer dan forten enhanced the game's atmosphere with his dark aggressive soundtrack with hints of asian inspiration ed boone had already showcased his voice acting skills on numerous pinball machines and arcade games and would also do so for mortal kombat [Music] excellent the raw bloody over-the-top action quickly caught traction inside the company but mortal kombat was about to endure its first big test it is tradition for arcade games to test early prototypes during production in a selected arcade to estimate how well the game will perform typically a stressful moment as a poor result could mean the end of the project with some nerves tobias rolled in their pre-production arcade cabinet crowds were packed around street fighter 2 slowly but steadily they would move over to mortal combat to witness for themselves the raw over-the-top action by the life-like fighters the weekend test exceeded all expectations granting the team a few more months of production the character of sonja was added late in the process to round up the roster of playable characters she was given the backstory for an already conceptualized secret agent character because filming of actors and pickup shots took place over the course of production consistency in filming and post-production were key [Music] while personnel at midway were play-testing the prototypes the mortal kombat crew brought the whole cast back for the character profile scenes the actors were shot against a piece of black cloth to quickly provide some texture without the need for laborious post-production once the final touches were made and roms were burned the manufacturing department constructed the cabinets to be distributed among arcades around the world the game's raw lifelike look combined with the over-the-top gory action attracted audiences but the fun and fast gameplay made them come back again and again making it a big hit in the arcades the publishing company acclaim had already signed a deal with williams years prior to have the first refusal for any of their console adaptations porting the games was outsourced to development companies who they deemed fitting for the project acclaim bet heavily on the success of mortal kombat dedicating a marketing budget past the 10 million dollar mark numbers unheard of for a third party game within a couple of weeks a claim would fully recoup their investment the home conversions catapulted the popularity of mortal kombat bringing it to the masses sega especially greatly benefited from its success as their version still included all the fatalities via a secret code leading it to outsell the super nintendo version by three to one in the early 90s digital imaging was maturing at a rapid pace in the visual effects industry the transition to digital compositing software took the market by storm renowned high-end packages like flame and nuke were introduced to assist the artists with the ever-growing challenges in the desktop market video toaster for the amiga and the first releases of premiere and after effects hit the market on the still image front photoshop was quickly making its mark as an affordable alternative to costly high-end image editing systems as were its competing packages paint shop pro and photo paint inside williams there was a growing reliance on digitized graphics jack hager and warren davis made it a priority to update their studio and equipment davis upgraded the capture pcs with a new target board that had a built-in chroma keyer chroma keyers are software functions that enable artists to create an alpha matte by selecting a specific color range and so separate actors from their backgrounds davis improved his capture software to make full use of this feature midway also invested in a broadcast quality beta cam camera which was a big step up from the prosumer high 8 format eliminating the over-exposed highlights that plagued the crew before the new studio setup was done right in time for the sequel to their successful fighter mortal kombat 2. [Music] one dilemma the mortal kombat team still faced was whether or not to shoot the actors against a blue screen compared to the consumer tape formats the chrominance or color resolution of betacam was higher and thus more suitable for keying but it was still an analog tape format that would mean some blue would bleed over into the actors the tools available at midway for dealing with these issues were not adequate and would mean extra touch-up work by hand for the artist for the time being they found that shooting against a grey background was still the more economical option in their situation when going around the arcades the mortal kombat crew would always check from the operator menu which characters were the most popular these statistics greatly influenced who to include in the sequel by taking advantage of pellet swaps and the increased rom capacity the roster was boosted to 12 playable characters it would mark the introduction of jax and katana who had been considered for the first game the original mortal kombat had a raw digitized look partly because of its compressed schedule for the sequel the art team digitally touched up all character frames during post-production to accentuate facial features muscles and other details leading to a much cleaner look to aid in this laborious process tony goski joined the art team like vogel and tobias he was a graduate of the american academy of art tobias remained in charge of character design along with his role as co-director shared with ed boone the tournament in mortal kombat 2 was set in the fictional location out world which allowed for more fantastical new characters and environments a perfect fit for tony's talent in surrealism the backgrounds were created using a mixture of traditional pixel art and digitized images and textures for example midway artist steve buran dressed up as a floating monk for the occasion ed boone would further improve the gameplay making it feel tighter the fatalities were a key attraction of mortal kombat in the sequel they were even more outrageous and for the more compassionate players friendships and babalities were added to the mix for the safety of the actors most of these effects were created digitally the dragon transformation was realized using the latest morphing software to smoothly morph frames of the actor into the pixel art dragon to dan forden's delight the new arcade board used a sample-based adsp audio board instead of relying on fm instrumentation he could now incorporate real guitar and flute recordings into the score pinball legend steve ritchie would lend his deep voice to the project as the announcer and xiao khan as the production advanced with mortal kombat 2 warren davis solved a big bottleneck in the production process taking advantage of higher buses and bigger hard drives he upgraded his capture software to take direct feeds from the camera sensor thereby bypassing the tape compression this greatly improved the clarity of the final image and made shooting against blue screen a much more economical solution for the crew all footage for the final boss xiao khan was filmed using this enhanced setup isolating the actor frames from the background was now less labor-intensive all the improvements made to the workflow in combination with the larger development window would take the sequel above and beyond the massive success of mortal kombat 2 established that the series was there to stay [Music] atari games was another company that embraced digitized graphics in their arcade games early on arcade pioneer dave toyra responsible for tempest concentrated on developing his own graphics tool in the late 80s called debabalyzer atari made great use of it during the development of their games at that time one of them being pit fighter this game was first pitched in late 1988 as bloodsport according to their market research some of the strongest earnings were made by games in this genre the development team made sure their product would differ from the competition introducing the gritty lifelike look to the genre debabilizer was an important package that could process all digitized frames and create palleted files the artist could use its color reduction algorithm or define their own palette they chose to dedicate a large portion of the palette to the flesh tones to realize the smooth gradients for animation purposes the artists relied on atari's own package called rad pit fighter was a great success for atari and would get its spiritual sequel in guardians of the hood toiro left atari and made debalizer commercially available it quickly became the package to edit large numbers of images through automated batch processes primal rage would prove to be atari games most ambitious project pitting fierce prehistoric monsters against each other in a violent battle the work of the artists was becoming more diverse than ever before as the industry was moving in new directions they had to quickly master complex techniques used for feature film production as the bar for video game graphics kept being raised one of the leads on primal rage got in contact with a local stop-motion company that introduced him to pete cleneau a stop-motion veteran with credits ranging from gremlins to the empire strikes back to turn the concept into stop-motion puppets atari contracted a renowned la-based model shop the company sculpted and detailed clay models and made the final foam casts through a series of time-consuming processes costing atari fifty thousand dollars per beast [Music] the puppets were shot frame by frame in a small studio setup art director jason leong sketched out the various poses as reference for the stop-motion animator they adapted a key method used in the visual effects industry to shoot each frame in multiple passes a beauty pass that lights the characters in the best possible way a matte pass in which only the background was lit and so could be used as an alpha channel and lastly a shadow pass that had strong top light to accentuate the shadows in a debabilizer batch conversion process all three images were combined into a single image with shadow and alpha channel and thus greatly reducing the work done by hand aside from the stop motion process there was also a live-action shoot to capture the human tribes the game's strong art direction would blend all ingredients neatly together primal rage was a monster hit in the arcades and greatly benefited from the controversy around violence in games in the home market [Music] since the early 90s digitized graphics were being adapted rapidly in the video game industry blue sky software used a combination of live action stop motion and some 3d graphics for the mega drive game jurassic park stan winston studios who worked on the feature film provided a number of their stop-motion puppets for this video game adaptation the blue sky crew used the now commercially available debabilizer to reduce the high color images to 16 color paletted files like many of the western studios deluxe paint was their graphics software of choice to further touch up the images over at midway the mortal kombat crew was wrapping their heads around the third installment they knew they had to switch some things up to keep it fresh for arcade audiences part 2 had such a big focus on the ninja style characters that their number was drastically turned down for the third entry and an array of new characters were added to the mix ranging from stop-motion puppet shiva to the cyber assassins played by nba jam pixel artist devita his costume was a mixture of bmx motocross and hockey gear rubber tubing and the necessary duct tape production could now make full use of the digital shooting stage from the get-go capturing and even selecting frames live on set extracting the actors from the backgrounds was now a largely automated process only their boots were still masked manually because a blue floor would cause too much blue spill learning from past experience they mainly chose tight-fit clothes as they translated best to the low resolution graphics the majority of the actors were dressed in red costumes that were meant to include blues were shifted to the correct color in post-production all improvements resulted in an efficient workflow and ultimately clearer sprites although the final touch-up work remained laborious on the software front photoshop was on its way to become an industry standard before the mortal kombat crew started working on the third game photoshop 2.5 hit the market featuring an extensive tool set to paint and isolate areas and manipulate them photoshop was a valuable addition for the art team and would be used in conjunction with the other packages another undeniable trend in gaming graphics was the use of 3d packages midway attracted david mkhitch a teacher in computer graphics at columbia college he would bring them up to speed and together with the new recruit steve buran further strengthened the art team they brought earthrealm to life using one of the leading 3d packages running on a silicon graphics indigo workstation ed boon sped up the action for this installment with a new run ability direct combos and more assertive ai the programmer had always been a fan of hiding secrets in the games some even unknown to his fellow workers for mortal kombat 3 he actually implemented some fan theories like animalities a unique feature ed boon had come up with during production was a code system whereby players could unlock a variety of play features with specific symbol combinations marketing ran with the idea and planned out the leaking of codes in publications throughout the year adding to the longevity of the arcade game furthermore arcade owners were guaranteed a free upgrade of the game featuring new backgrounds and characters that were held back for the original release the upgrade would coincide with home ports for the regular mortal kombat 3 and thus guaranteed arcade owners to have the latest exclusive edition available to keep players interested mortal kombat 3 marks the end of an era the usage of 3d packages to help create the backgrounds had been a foreshadowing of the direction of the series the shooting stage was replaced by a motion capture studio as the characters were now created in the digital realm within the industry the trend to digitize actors and set pieces would last for a couple more years but would quickly make way for cgi the digitization trend brought us many different aesthetics blending all kinds of crafts with the video game world filming compositing to stop motion animation and even claymation during its rise the advancements in desktop systems and imaging software had been tremendous but nevertheless the tool development of davis and toira proved to be pivotal to the workflow although the workflows would drastically change in the polygon era some of the principles would still remain useful for the artists during their careers 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Length: 27min 59sec (1679 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 04 2022