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Any idea why in the 90s so many non-Japanese games, even high profile games, hired absolutely terrible concept and cover artists? Amateurish linework, janky anatomy, abysmal coloring etc. I say non-Japanese because I'm left with the impression that the Japanese hired actual professionals instead of comic book industry rejects
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Jan 4, 2018 15:58
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OneEightHundred posted:Could you be more specific? The art director, cover artist and promo artist for Street Fighter 2 was Akira motherfucking Yasuda. The artist for the American cover was a self-admitted kitsch painter, who... wasn't very good. Alright, maybe compared to a living legend like Akiman, anyone would look like a mild embarrassment at best. Maybe I'm being unfair. But... Toby Gard (Tomb Raider):     Charles Zembillas (Crash Bandicoot):    Adrian Carmack (Doom):    Kevin Cloud (Doom):  Samwise Didier (Warcraft):     Kevin Kilstrom (Blood):   Various, unnamed (Shogo):     Come on, let's be honest: these guys weren't very good. When these embarrassments somehow ended up in press kits, I felt bad for the developers And I'll never understand the obsession everyone seemed to have for lovely CGI covers back then, to the point of American publishers replacing well designed, timeless covers with instantly dated CGI that didn't look good even at the time hackbunny fucked around with this message at 00:38 on Jan 5, 2018 |
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Jan 5, 2018 00:36
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Whistling rear end in a top hat posted:I don't mean to pick on you but there's nothing I hate more in the world than lazy, sweeping generalizations. With literally 5 minutes of research you could have typed "box art comparisons" into Google and seen how off-base your point was. I had no "point". I remembered atrocious concept art from the 90s, I looked for it, I found it. I'm not here to attack or defend the honor of anyone, because frankly, it's pointless: not only the quality of concept art rarely reflected on the quality of assets (case in point: Command & Conquer had kick-loving-rear end concept art that was completely thrown away and replaced with generic crap), but after a little research it turned out that this kind of "school notebook doodle" concept art was a very small minority of the cases (e.g. I was surprised at how good the concept art for Diablo was, and of course there's all the Designers Republic games, that were basically playable concept art). So what? it's still crappy art that ended up printed in magazines and was supposed to drum up attention for the game, and I want to know the circumstances that lead a studio to make a misstep like that hackbunny fucked around with this message at 14:19 on Jan 5, 2018 |
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Jan 5, 2018 14:10
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OneEightHundred posted:Charles Zembillas worked on kids' TV shows before he worked on Crash, and most of the other ones listed were mixed-role. Another interesting one is Blood's Kevin Kilstrom, who was actually a prop maker: the game sprites were digitized photos of stop-motion puppets he had made (IIRC this is how Doom sprites were made as well). Some good:  Some, eh, not as good:  Eric Kohler did the concept art for for Blood II, and it was much, much better. No more puppets either, the game was in full 3D. Not that better art and slicker graphics made Blood II a better game, anyway...
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Jan 5, 2018 14:53
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floofyscorp posted:I mean, Tomb Raider, Crash Bandicoot, Doom, Warcraft... I think these games did pretty okay despite the 'misstep'. Yes, and for many games the imperfect art (that often - but not always - reflected on the game graphics) was a great part of the charm. But could they afford it now? ever again? That's why I specified "the 90s" floofyscorp posted:It's just production art. Not all production art is a polished masterpiece. Agh, what's so hard to understand? Sure, Diablo concept art was a series of "polished masterpieces", seriously, look at them, they're so beautiful and stylish I almost doubt their practical value. Resident Evil's, to name one of a majority of others, was rough and utilitarian. But come on, Dungeon Keeper's was made by a high school doodler (and I say this as a prolific high school doodler who would have killed for a chance to do concept art for a videogame). You need at least someone on the team who understands the basics of character design (or even draw an uninterrupted line longer than half an inch... like knows like) and won't just throw random muscles horns and spikes around exquisite tea posted:Nobody was expecting high quality work at the time because the demand wasn't there, now original art is probably the single most expensive element of video game production. Yes, this is my point. It may be a naive question, but why's that? Is it just heightened expectations, or is it a production requirement now?
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Jan 5, 2018 15:41
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Chev posted:You merely cherry-picked the three exceptions and pretended they were indicative of an actual trend rather than just one guy at Blizzard back then being a better artist than the observed average. Make up your minds guys, did I cherry pick bad artists or did I cherry pick good artists? I've been literally going through huge Wikipedia lists of 90s videogames, taking the most popular games and searching for their concept art on Google Images. That's like the diametrical opposite of cherry picking, and I've been learning a lot. I had started with the assumption things were much worse, in fact The truth is that the vast majority of artists were clearly professionals of varying levels of skill, a small minority were legit capital-A Artists (e.g. PaRappa the Rapper's Rodney Greenblat), and the rest were blatant amateurs (some haven't even improved since - yeah you Toby Gard, I've seen your Legend sketches). I've done some pretty lackluster work myself at the start of my career (programmer) and I wonder sometimes by what miracle they kept me. I've also explained that, as a fellow (former) amateur artist who could make passable art, I can tell when another artist doesn't quite clear the bar for "professional" exquisite tea posted:The art in those 90s Blizzard manuals isn't much different from what you'd see in any monster manual or D&D rulebooks from the same era, YEP. That era's Magic: The Gathering cards too. Remember the time an artist misread "tome" as "tomb"? and Wizards of the Coast went "eh, that'll do" and printed a "tome" card illustrated with a tomb? And it was some character's tome/tomb, so they had to kill him off to make the tomb make sense? exquisite tea posted:If you're asking why the bar is set much higher now that video games are a multibillion dollar industry, then well that kinda answers its own question doesn't it. No I'm asking why art (as opposed to modelling etc.) is now such a big part of a game's budget
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Jan 5, 2018 20:20
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mutata posted:Is there something with the existing answers that doesn't sit right with you? Asking for reals. No, I understand the answers and they make sense. I just don't want people to think I'm going for a shallow "superior Hanzo art folded a million times" point. Hell, I even found perfect counterexamples with PaRappa (Japanese game, good American artist) and Shogo (American game, awful Japanese artist) mutata posted:What is your understanding of what makes up art for games and it's percentage of the budget? I don't understand much, a good half or more of the roles in the "door question" were new to me. I was like "this makes sense" but also "it's an actual job description?". I'm probably seriously underestimating how many people work on a modern game hackbunny fucked around with this message at 20:41 on Jan 5, 2018 |
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Jan 5, 2018 20:37
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Gerblyn posted:I think one of the biggest differences between now and the 90s is that, in the 90s, computers weren't really capable of producing 3D art to a degree which really demanded super refined and rendered 2D concept art. Oh of course. Broken Sword was a 2D game and it had like, perfect concept art. And then there's the funny part where multiple games with sprites used stop motion puppets instead of, you know, pixel art. It's not like there was a dearth of pixel artists in America at the time, it seems that basically 100% of Amiga games had hand-drawn pixel art, and Amiga wasn't an obscure platform either. All signs seem to point to a pretty insular culture, plus a huge commitment to immature technologies (motion capture, 3D, CGI) in the name of "realism" hackbunny fucked around with this message at 21:56 on Jan 5, 2018 |
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Jan 5, 2018 21:41
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GC_ChrisReeves posted:Hey hackbunny, you PMed me instead of responding here, must have been a mistake. Nice derail fucktard. You talk a big deal but then you do this childish poo poo (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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Jan 5, 2018 22:18
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