Pre-Rendered Backgrounds

A pre-rendered background is a picture of a place, drawn or rendered in advance at whatever quality the artists can afford, with polygon characters drawn over it at run time from a fixed camera. Reviewers traced the formula from Alone in the Dark in 1993 through Myst to Resident Evil in 1996, by which point “pre-rendered backgrounds” was a standard phrase in a preview; Final Fantasy VII made it the look of the PlayStation’s biggest game.

Fast facts

The formula named: “Resident Evil is Alone in the Dark directed by George A Romero with the design sensibilities of Myst” (Edge, June 1996).
Alone in the Dark (1992): polygon characters against painted rooms; “While many rooms have only two such camera views, some have up to nine!” (Computer Gaming World, February 1993).
Myst (1993): “Each scene is presented as a 3-D rendered, stationary backdrop” (Computer Gaming World, December 1993).
Final Fantasy VII (1997): “prerendered backdrops inhabited by realtime 3D Gouraud-shaded characters” that “made Square SGI’s largest desktop customer” (Edge, March 1997).
The cost: the camera cannot move, so the designer chooses every angle.

How it works

The background is an image, not a model. Where it was rendered from a 3D scene, the scene can be as detailed as the artists like, because it is rendered once, offline, and never again; the game ships only the picture. Characters are real polygon models, transformed and drawn each frame, and placed in the picture by a camera whose position and lens match the one the picture was rendered from. Because the camera is fixed for each picture, moving the character to the edge of the frame cuts to another picture from another angle. The seams between the painted scene and the live character are what the technique’s critics noticed first and its best games hid best.

Alone in the Dark and Myst

Chris Lombardi’s Computer Gaming World preview of Alone in the Dark in February 1993 described the first half of the formula: “The player assumes the role of a character whose image is composed of simple geometric shapes… the result is rather rough”. What sold him was the second half: “the extensive use of ‘camera angles’ to continually change the player’s perspective. As one’s character moves about a room, one’s perspective will change many times; from a straight-away side-on pan, to an overhead ‘closet-set’ shot, to an ‘insect-view’ from floor level, to many other perspectives in the visual grammar of cinema. While many rooms have only two such camera views, some have up to nine!” He also named the cost: “Swift changes in the viewpoint can occasionally be disastrous when the player’s character is in combat mode.”

Myst, the same year, took the pictures without the polygons. “Each scene is presented as a 3-D rendered, stationary backdrop,” Computer Gaming World wrote in December 1993. “Any animation that may occur is contained within QuickTime windows that are seamlessly integrated into that backdrop. Navigation is controlled by clicking on the screen in the direction desired.” The engine underneath was HyperCard.

Resident Evil

Capcom put the two together. Edge’s caption for its March 1996 interview with Akio Sakai read “Capcom’s zombiefest, Resident Evil gels Alone in the Dark gameplay with blood and guts”; Sakai traced the mansion to the company’s own NES game Sweet Home. The June 1996 review gave Resident Evil nine out of ten and the sentence the genre has kept: “Resident Evil is Alone in the Dark directed by George A Romero with the design sensibilities of Myst.”

The review measured the backgrounds against a rival that had the same idea and less art. Infogrames’ Time Gate had “polygon figures [that] look hopelessly inadequate even against backgrounds that boast a fraction of the detail of Resident Evil’s (words alone fail to do justice to the fanatical richness of Resident Evil’s art design, where even the wallpaper and carpets warrant admiring scrutiny)”. The fixed camera was counted as a design choice: “Everything in Resident Evil is geared towards suspense: the skewed camera angles, the haunting strains of the soundtrack, the fact that you can run forwards but only retreat in painfully slow steps.” The control scheme that went with it has its own entry: tank controls.

By November 1996 the phrase needed no explanation. Previewing Ecstatica 2, Edge wrote that “the closest modern reference points are probably Time Gate and Time Commando — all three games feature pre-rendered backgrounds”, and of Queen: The Eye, “Using some exquisite prerendered backdrops and realtime polygon characters, Queen looks quite beautiful”.

Final Fantasy VII

Square’s Final Fantasy VII launched in Japan on 31 January 1997 and sold, by Edge’s count, “nearly 2.04m units in just three days”. The magazine found “the incredible prerendered backdrops inhabited by realtime 3D Gouraud-shaded characters are easily the most striking thing about the game (and in the process have made Square SGI’s largest desktop customer)”. The PC conversion in 1998 showed the limits of the picture: “The 3D acceleration affects only the character models, the battle engine, and the overworld map. The prerendered backgrounds are a bit washed out, probably due to monitor-versus-TV resolution problems.”

On the PC

PC adventures reached the same place from the other direction — 2D games adding a polygon lead. Perfect Entertainment described Discworld Noir to PC Zone in November 1998: “It’s not 2D any more, it’s 3D. The backdrops are pre-rendered at a very high resolution, and the main character is rendered in real-time 3D. It’ll all be light-sourced in real-time too.” The lead was “over 2000 polygons”; “Not all the characters will be real-time though”. LucasArts’ Grim Fandango shipped the same year on the same plan.

Static beauty