Great Moments in Videogames:
Now that I have got my Spring classes in good shape I have been back working on my lesson plans for my upcoming Fall History of Videogames class. I have just got to 1983. A very important year. The Videogame Industry was still ruled by arcades. Home consoles where coming in but there was a major downturn on the way. The in battles in the console wars were still a few years off.
Don Bluth and Rick Dyer 1983, up until this time game animation in videogames was done by engineers, pixels moving across the screen. Beep, beep. beep! Dragon’s Lair was the first major coming together of real animators and game engineers. Breath taking animation and a storyline, what will they think of next?
Dragon`s Lair was 50 cents a try with 5 lives per turn. I didn't play much because of the cost but I was in the crowd of on lookers. You could always tell where the Dragon`s Lair machine was in the arcade by the crowd. Dragon`s Lair was the only arcade game that people would watch like a film. It pulled players away from other machines.
It seems so logical today, but up until this time no one ever thought there was any need for people with a knowledge of movement involved in the creation of movement in the, then, 9 billion dollar game industry.
Pong had come out 11 years before, back in 1972, and in all those years in between no one had ever thought; Hey, there is animation in this damn game, maybe game designers needed to know something about movement?
After Bluth and Dyer very few would make that mistake again. Today`s games are story driven with scripts and character designs by top people. Writers and testers and producers, oh my.
Game animation and cut screen animation is now done by people who know how to make things move in a state of the art manner. The game pipeline has been modeled on the film pipeline. There are storyboards and continuity meetings. And a lot of film animators have moved into this once engineer driven field.
In the long run Dragon`s Lair was a dead end. Very few games are done with traditional board animation these days. It may not have been the game of the future but it was the first game to call attention to the need for professional storytellers in the process. Don and Rick are heros and pioneers.
So if you are thinking about following them into this field (a field that still brings in more money every year than the movie industry) you need to plan your training. The ideal school would teach programmers beginning animation and animators beginning programming. What will they think of next?
Don Bluth and Rick Dyer 1983, up until this time game animation in videogames was done by engineers, pixels moving across the screen. Beep, beep. beep! Dragon’s Lair was the first major coming together of real animators and game engineers. Breath taking animation and a storyline, what will they think of next?
Dragon`s Lair was 50 cents a try with 5 lives per turn. I didn't play much because of the cost but I was in the crowd of on lookers. You could always tell where the Dragon`s Lair machine was in the arcade by the crowd. Dragon`s Lair was the only arcade game that people would watch like a film. It pulled players away from other machines.
It seems so logical today, but up until this time no one ever thought there was any need for people with a knowledge of movement involved in the creation of movement in the, then, 9 billion dollar game industry.
Pong had come out 11 years before, back in 1972, and in all those years in between no one had ever thought; Hey, there is animation in this damn game, maybe game designers needed to know something about movement?
After Bluth and Dyer very few would make that mistake again. Today`s games are story driven with scripts and character designs by top people. Writers and testers and producers, oh my.
Game animation and cut screen animation is now done by people who know how to make things move in a state of the art manner. The game pipeline has been modeled on the film pipeline. There are storyboards and continuity meetings. And a lot of film animators have moved into this once engineer driven field.
In the long run Dragon`s Lair was a dead end. Very few games are done with traditional board animation these days. It may not have been the game of the future but it was the first game to call attention to the need for professional storytellers in the process. Don and Rick are heros and pioneers.
So if you are thinking about following them into this field (a field that still brings in more money every year than the movie industry) you need to plan your training. The ideal school would teach programmers beginning animation and animators beginning programming. What will they think of next?
posted by Larry Loc @ 11:40 AM
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