A digitised sprite is a photograph that learned to move. Film a real person, freeze the video one frame at a time, cut the figure out of the background, squeeze its colours into the handful a machine can show, and play the frames back as game graphics. The look arrived in the arcades as early as 1983, was a novelty on home computers by the late 1980s, and made Mortal Kombat both famous and notorious in the early 1990s. Within a few years critics were tired of it.
Fast facts
- Early arcade use: Bally/Midway’s Journey (1983) put photographic faces of the rock band on stick-figure bodies.
- Home computers: MicroLeague Wrestling on the C64 and The Three Stooges on the Amiga were both reviewed in June 1988; Dynamix’s David Wolf: Secret Agent on PC early in 1990.
- Williams’ video pipeline: built by Warren Davis; first used in NARC (1988), later in Mortal Kombat, NBA Jam and Revolution X.
- Whole fighters: Atari Games’ Pit-Fighter (1990).
- Defining use: Mortal Kombat (Midway, 1992) and its sequels.
- Not the same thing: pre-rendered 3D sprites (Donkey Kong Country) and full motion video (Night Trap).
Three ways to look real
Three techniques of the same years get confused because each made games look more like film than drawing.
| Technique | Where the pictures come from | Examples |
|---|---|---|
| Digitised sprites | Real people filmed or photographed; frames captured, cut out and palette-reduced, then moved by the game like any sprite | Journey, NARC, Pit-Fighter, Mortal Kombat, NBA Jam |
| Pre-rendered sprites | 3D models rendered offline on workstations and output as sprite frames | Donkey Kong Country, Killer Instinct |
| Full motion video | Whole stretches of film played back; the player chooses between clips rather than steering a figure | Night Trap, The 7th Guest |
Edge described Rare’s method in 1994: “Everything in the game — the sprites, the backgrounds and the 6,000+ frames of animation — is rendered”, using “Alias’ PowerAnimator software running on Silicon Graphics equipment”. No camera was involved. Sega sold Night Trap in 1992 as “the first game to give you interactive game play with digitized film footage”, which is a different claim: its actors never became sprites. And hand-drawn sprites, as in Street Fighter II, remained the look many critics preferred. “Mortal Kombat II’s digitised fighters lack the personality of their more cartoon-like counterparts in Street Fighter II,” wrote Edge.
Faces in 1983
The first digitised people most arcade players met belonged to the rock band Journey. Bally/Midway’s Journey coin-op of 1983, a game about the band recovering their stolen instruments, drew the musicians as small stick figures topped with their real faces. Video Arcade Games was unimpressed by the game but not by that: “the faces of the band members look as if they are black and white photographs. This is one of the biggest steps toward making game graphics appear more true to life.” Later writers were less kind; Edge remembered “the poorly digitised heads” in 2003.
Williams and the pause button
Most of the technique’s later history runs through one company. Warren Davis, the programmer of Q*bert, left the industry after the crash of 1984 and returned some years later at Williams in Chicago, where he started work on a system that could raise its games from 32 colours to 256. “I realised with that many colours you could start to approach true video graphics,” he told Retro Gamer. His first system was simple: it “allowed a standard video recording to be paused and each frame digitised for use within a game”. The first game to use it was Eugene Jarvis’s NARC (1988), an anti-drug shoot-’em-up.
Williams remembered it as a first. Roger Sharpe of WMS Industries told Nintendo Power in 1994 that “N.A.R.C. was our first game, in fact the first game, to use digitized graphics”. It was Williams’ first; it was not the first game. Journey came from Bally/Midway, the company whose games division Williams bought in 1988.
Davis left Williams for a while and at Gottlieb made Exterminator, a game about swatting insects with a giant hand, which Retro Gamer called “the first game to solely use digitised graphics”; only 250 machines were sold. Called back to Williams to help finish Terminator 2, he spent the early 1990s refining the software, until “actors could be filmed directly and their digitised images could be in the computer’s memory within minutes”. By Revolution X Williams had a blue-screen studio, and Aerosmith spent “two 13-hour days” in it.
Pit-Fighter
Atari Games’ Pit-Fighter was the game that made digitised people the whole show. Three fighters, played by real performers, brawled in an underground pit while the “camera” moved in and out. CU Amiga’s reporters at London’s ATEI trade show, early in 1991, put its place in history precisely: “Arcade manufacturers have flirted with digitised graphics before, but never has a game been created entirely from them.” They also found that “the characters move so badly that the reality is completely destroyed”. The takings told a different story: The One reported that it became Atari’s fastest-selling coin-op on its release in 1990.
The coin-op, ACE explained, “boasts 256-colour digitised graphics and specialist hardware to shrink and scale the sprites and backgrounds”. Home machines had no such hardware. Domark’s home conversions were eight months’ work for Peter Jefferies of Teque, who stored the fighters as “64 x 64 pixel 16-colour” images and scaled them in software; he called the scaling “without doubt the hardest aspect”. The conversion needed no graphic artist at all, because the pictures came ready-made from Atari, from Tengen, and “directly from the coin-op”. The Mega Drive version dropped the zooming altogether. Megatech, previewing it, asked the obvious question: “Pitfighter is the first beat ’em up to use digitised characters, could it set the pace for future combat games?” The sprite scaling entry follows the scaling side of the story.
How Mortal Kombat did it
Mortal Kombat answered Megatech’s question. Its makers, Ed Boon and John Tobias, used Davis’s video techniques, and the Mortal Kombat entry tells the story of the first game. When Nintendo Power visited the team during Mortal Kombat 3 in 1995, they explained the process step by step.
Casting. “Some of the actors are martial artists and some of them aren’t,” Tobias said. “Basically they just have to be real … They have to be able to withstand eight hours of jumping, ducking, kicking, hitting and flying across the screen.”
Shooting. Many moves were “first acted out by John and Ed” for the performers. “We show them how to fly across the screen,” Boon joked, and many moves came from “improvization during the shooting sessions”.
Clean-up. “Once the raw video was shot and digitized, the frames got individual attention. Character frames were limited to 64 colors, but John Tobias and Steve Beran bumped certain colors to enhance clarity and spent endless hours retouching everything by hand.” The backgrounds were built another way: one artist used “3-D rendering programs to create some of the elements”, and another put the scene together “using programs like Photoshop”.
Memory. MK3 took “10 months and seven people” and filled “18 Megabytes of ROM … more than twice as much memory as the original Mortal Kombat”. Every frame of every move was a separate picture, so the memory went on frames.
What it cost smaller machines
Palette swaps. One actor, recoloured, could be several characters. Amiga Game Zone’s reviewer of the Amiga Mortal Kombat noticed “such shortcuts as using the same frames of animation for Scorpion and Sub-Zero” with only a colour change.
Fewer frames. A home version had a fraction of the arcade board’s memory, so frames were cut. The same review found that the visuals “may look good in still pictures — but when seen in action, the jerkiness and poor animation is immediately apparent.”
The home computers
On home computers digitised pictures had been a selling point for some years before Pit-Fighter. MicroLeague Wrestling on the C64 loaded “digitised interview sequences between ‘Mean Gene’ Okerlund and each wrestler”, and Zzap!64 found them “well-timed but sometimes indistinct”. In the same issue its Amiga round-up praised Mirrorsoft’s The Three Stooges for “superb digitised graphics”. By 1990 Dynamix’s David Wolf: Secret Agent on the PC used actors throughout, and The Games Machine thought “the use of actors and digitised graphics” set it “apart from every other game of its kind”. These were mostly still pictures and cut-scenes rather than sprites the player controlled, which is what the arcade games added.
Reception and decline
The realism was the point and the problem. It made Mortal Kombat’s violence look like violence, in the years when Senators Joseph Lieberman and Herb Kohl were sponsoring “video game rating legislation” and Sega was already printing its own ratings; the 1993 hearings entry tells that story. At NBA Jam, Sharpe said, real players who saw themselves in the game joked, “It would be great if I really could shoot three-pointers like that!”
The style also aged quickly. By late 1994 Edge could assume its readers had “railed against poorly digitised actors laid on top of unimaginative rendered backgrounds”. Rendered sprites offered the same solidity with smoother movement, then real-time polygons replaced sprites altogether, and motion capture took over the job of getting a real performer’s movement into a game.
Sources
- Video Arcade Games, vol. 1 no. 2, December 1983, p. 25: Journey from Bally/Midway, the band’s faces “as if they are black and white photographs”.
- Enter, vol. 1 no. 1, October 1983, p. 37: the Journey coin-op, the first home game converted to an arcade machine, its band members drawn with their faces.
- Digital Press issue 17, March 1994, p. 7: “digitized monochrome faces of the band were attached to anemic stick-figures”.
- Edge issue 130, December 2003, p. 60: Journey’s “poorly digitised heads”.
- Zzap!64 issue 38, June 1988, p. 76: the Amiga The Three Stooges; p. 81: MicroLeague Wrestling, graphics 71%.
- Paul Rigby, David Wolf: Secret Agent review, The Games Machine issue 27, February 1990, p. 31.
- “Desert Island Disks: Warren Davis”, Retro Gamer issue 21, 2005, pp. 76–78: 32 to 256 colours, the paused-video system, NARC, Exterminator and its 250 machines, Terminator 2, filming actors directly, Revolution X and the blue-screen studio.
- Nintendo Power issue 62, July 1994, pp. 56–57: Roger Sharpe on NARC and NBA Jam, the Williams timeline.
- Computer and Video Games issue 108, November 1990, p. 8: Pit Fighter among Domark’s Atari licences.
- John Cook and Mike Pattenden, ATEI show report, CU Amiga, February 1991, p. 77: Pit Fighter “created entirely” from digitised graphics.
- The One issue 36, September 1991, p. 18: Pit Fighter as Atari’s fastest-selling coin-op on its release the year before.
- ACE issue 50, November 1991, pp. 38–39: the Pitfighter coin-op and Teque’s conversion.
- Megatech issue 1, December 1991, p. 7: the Mega Drive Pitfighter preview.
- Nintendo Power issue 72, May 1995, pp. 23–24: the Mortal Kombat 3 team on casting, shooting, retouching and memory.
- Amiga Game Zone issue 2, May 1994, p. 15: the Amiga Mortal Kombat.
- Edge issue 12, September 1994, p. 43: Donkey Kong Country rendered on Silicon Graphics machines.
- Edge issue 13, October 1994: Mortal Kombat II console review; Ecstatica preview, p. 44.
- Sega Visions, November 1992, p. 40: Night Trap and “digitized film footage”.
- Sega Visions, April 1994, p. 16: letters on ratings; Lieberman and Kohl.