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Retro Rework — Description
Throughout the years I've become more and more desiring of an old dream of mine. Old games looking good. The years go by and the majority of what I see done of older things or things trying to be like older things is imitating the 8-Bit or 16-Bit sprite limitations. Which can look nice when done right, but...in the back of my mind...I've ALWAYS wanted games to just look as good as they can. The ONLY reason they ever looked like that was due to the simple fact that it was limitations. You know that had they the resources and advancements back then the creators would've made the characters and enemies look like how they actually looked on the arcade cabinets or in illustrations or instruction books. And it's THAT that I've always wanted to see. THAT is why I was so astounded by Rayman Origins when it came out. It was essentially the epitome of everything I had wanted from sidescrollers for so long. It showed what they COULD finally be. The dream of the creators on the screen as opposed to some blocky approximation of that idea.

But then you just get game after game of pixely few-frame throwbacks to carry on the "tribute" to "retro" games.

So I got to work. Whenever I'd think of some game or get the want to look through documentaries about older games I'd start drawing up ideas for how to animate those older titles better or download sprite sheets from those games and redraw some of the frames into versions that had had the screenshots the originals were in upscaled to 1080 dimensions to give a more proper space to add the proper details onto the "sprites". The earliest I didn't even have any idea as to what size to make it. I just wanted to do it. Donkey Kong, Centipede. All I was concerned about initially was just making the images look good.

It's been one of the many many projects I've given myself over the past few years.

Obviously those Mario "animations" I've been doing of Mario ( www.deviantart.com/warahi/art/… )and the Shellcreeper ( www.deviantart.com/warahi/art/… ) are specifically for this. They were my first real attempts at doing actual animation for any of this stuff (just rough drafts to get an idea for how they moved). The Shellcreeper in particular you can see having it's "shell-kicking" animation planned out on this page. This page itself I first started doodling when I was working on that animation and then plastered various "sprites" I'd come up with or have never really finished over it. Still trying to figure out just what exactly Ridley is meant to look like in Metroid 1 since the various depictions of him in illustrations either show him as a cute little dragon or some...xenomorph bat-winged looking thing. Neither of which look like the sprite. And that guy next to Goemon in the center is how Goemon looked in the very first arcade game.

Hopefully someday this leads somewhere substantial.