The cartoon/SVGA era of adventure games?

[Korgoth of Barbaria]

What are the Codex's opinions on the Cartoon/SVGA era of adventure games?

I call it as such because it seems like every major, non-Myst style game after around 1993 or 1994 adopted a cartoonish art direction.

Notable titles from this era:

Day of the Tentacle (1993)
Sam & Max Hit the Road
King's Quest VII (1994)
Beneath a Steel Sky (1994)
The Bizarre Adventures of Woodruff and the Schnibble (1994)
Legend of Kyrandia Book III (1994)
The Dig (1995)
Full Throttle (1995)
Space Quest 6 (1995)
Torin's Passage (1995)
Simon the Sorceror II (1995)
Broken Sword (1996)
Leisure Suit Larry 7 (1996)
Toonstruck (1996)
Curse of Monkey Island (1997)

 

[gaussgunner]

I've only played one of those, and seen a couple others only because of friends' nostalgia, so I guess my answer is: meh.

Frankly the 80s adventure games I played - King's Quests, Space Quests, whatever - were also pretty cartoony. (S)VGA brought darker, grittier graphics to the PC and I was into that. Wizardy 7, Doom, Another World, Dune 2, Command & Conquer, and tons of forgettable shit games. I was also playing text adventures, roguelikes and online strategy games with ASCII & ANSI graphics, but no (S)VGA graphic adventures.

 

[Infinitron]

You're confusing multiple different styles here IMO. I would consider only some of these games to have the sleek "SVGA" Disney/Don Bluth-esque animated movie look. KQ7 was the first of these.

DoTT and Sam & Max have more of a chunky Looney Tunes style that's compatible with traditional pixel art.

Beneath a Steel Sky, Kyrandia 3 and Simon 2 to me are elaborate pixel art, not cartoons.

 

[gaussgunner]

Cartoony pixel art?

If there were any 1024x768 SVGA games I didn't have the patience to pirate them or wait for those huge uncompressed images to load from my 1x CD-ROM drive.

 

[Zed Duke of Banville]

What are the Codex's opinions on the Cartoon/SVGA era of adventure games?

I call it as such because it seems like every major, non-Myst style game after around 1993 or 1994 adopted a cartoonish art direction.

Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Father (1993) had an art style that was anything but cartoonish. The sequel, released in 1995, made the mistake of switching to FMV live-action graphics, already preceded by several other adventure games, something made possible by the popularization of CD-ROMs.

Likewise, Beneath a Steel Sky has graphics consisting of beautiful, non-cartoony pixel art --- and was quite dark at times.

 

[Boleskine]

Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Father (1993) had an art style that was anything but cartoonish.

The remake on the other hand...

Spoiler

 

[CryptRat]

Just stumbled upon this while looking for something else :

 

[MRY]

CryptRat Interesting that the remake didn't just use those.

Infinitron I've always thought of Kyrandia 3 as more one of the crappy beautiful 2D->ugly 3D transitions.

Spoiler

Here's a basically side-by-side of the same scene, but it's actually one of the least "ugly 3D" scenes of Kyrandia 3.
K2

K3

Here's a more obvious example of the ugly 3D--those mountains, water, and sky are almost certainly made in Bryce:

I agree, though, that Korgoth of Barbaria is mixing up two different styles. Lucas games had a particular visual idiom for a while, one that was tied to pixel art, and many of the games in the list fall into that, whether Lucas or not. I'm not even sure they were SVGA: DoTT, Sam & Max, Simon 2, maybe Full Throttle. Others don't fit into either that camp or the cartoony camp -- BASS, for instance, is totally different (and not SVGA, I don't think); SQ6 is just ugly, but not cartoony.

I do think you can compare KQVII, CMI, LSL7, and maybe Toonstruck. You might also add the Pajama Sam series. But I'm not sure how fruitful the comparison would be.

 

[CryptRat]

CryptRat Interesting that the remake didn't just use those.

Yes, it's somewhat incomprehensible, not that the backgrounds in the remake look terrible but the loss in quality is huge, each original one is a piece of art.

 

[MRY]

I think it was done because they needed to shift the style a bit to fit with the 3D rendered characters. They seemed not to be able to do high-resolution 2D sprites well, as the first remake showed, so perhaps this was the best they could muster.

 

[Sceptic]

I've always said all I'd want from a remake/remaster/whatever of the hand-painted VGA era adventure games is the exact same everything but using high quality scans of the original backgrounds and sprites. Sadly nobody seems to want to do this. In Sierra's case all the original paintings are probably long gone, considering the mess that happened around the Cendant scandal.

 

[MRY]

Were the sprites done by drawing? I always assumed they were concepted and then animated only at a pixel level.

 

[Fizzii]

The sprites were pixel animated, so there wouldn't be higher res versions of those. Pity, because higher res VGA style would look lovely.

 

[Unkillable Cat]

Aren't you all forgetting the wonderful world of technological limitations?

Look at character sprites in most 1980s graphical adventures. They're all the same size and draw distance is always the same. LucasArts games didn't bring in draw distance until the Secret of Monkey Island (1990) and Sierra On-Line not until King's Quest 6 (1992). But up until this point all character sprites were the same pre-determined size, though clever trickery could bring about the illusion of them not being so.

Every single protagonist in a Sierra graphical adventure using the AGI engine is the exact same size.
Every single protagonist in a Sierra graphical adventure using the SCI engine is the exact same size.
Every single protagonist in a Lucasarts graphical adventure using the first iteration of SCUMM (Maniac Mansion and Zac McKracken) is the exact same size.
Every single protagonist in a Lucasarts graphical adventure using the second iteration of SCUMM (Indiana Jones & The Last Crusade, Loom, Monkey Island 1 & 2, Indiana Jones & The Fate of Atlantis) are exactly the same size.
It isn't until Day of the Tentacle is released that the standardized sprite size disappears. Laverne is tall, Hoagie is fat, Bernard is Bernard, but none of them have the same dimensions, and none of them have the same standardized dimensions of previous SCUMM title protagonists. Meanwhile Sierra seems to have been stuck with standardized dimensions for a few more years, but in the meantime other studios were jumping in and getting a slice of the action (Discworld for example).

I believe that it's because of this sudden freedom that so many adventure games adopted a cartoony style: Because the animators finally had the "canvas" to draw outside of a standardized format.

The introduction of (S)VGA and the glaring pixellation problems apparent in many early 90s games is most likely also a factor in cartoony graphics gaining the upper hand during this era.

 

[Vaarna_Aarne]

Oooh I've never thought of that. Interesting little detail to old graphics and the technical wrestling going on when your hardware couldn't do just about anything.

 

[MRY]

Every single protagonist in a Lucasarts graphical adventure using the first iteration of SCUMM (Maniac Mansion and Zac McKracken) is the exact same size.
Every single protagonist in a Lucasarts graphical adventure using the second iteration of SCUMM (Indiana Jones & The Last Crusade, Loom, Monkey Island 1 & 2, Indiana Jones & The Fate of Atlantis) are exactly the same size.

I'm not sure what you mean "every single protagonist" -- do you mean the player-characters in a single game are all the same size, or the all the characters in the game, or all the player-characters across games?

On draw distance, I think you're right, although as you note, older games did tricks (like swapping Graham's height as he passes behind a dune or tree trunk).

 

[Darth Roxor]

 

[Unkillable Cat]

I'm not sure what you mean "every single protagonist" -- do you mean the player-characters in a single game are all the same size, or the all the characters in the game, or all the player-characters across games?

Thanks for the image, if I had known of it during my early-morning post I could have made my point better.

The point I was trying to make this morning was that in the early adventure games the protagonist (or 'actor' is perhaps more appropriate here) was of the exact size dimensions as other actors in the game, that is characters that move about and interact with the game world. All the characters in Maniac Mansion have the exact same physical build as Dave there, with the exception of the two tentacles, but even they come very close to the established dimensions. While every game from MM to Atlantis Indy has both this general rule and exceptions to it, the exceptions never stray far from the norm.

But now I'm seeing how my latter point, the introduction of (S)VGA and the standard pixel resolutions of the day, is more important than I thought. Compare Indy from Last Crusade to Indy from Fate of Atlantis. The former is a very basic pixelated shape that doesn't use a broad color palette, but only the most dimwitted individuals would fail to recognize who it is. The latter is 100% recognizable due to physical traits being more defined, but the extra tints of beige and brown actually work against it, as I for one now have to squint to be able to see clearly that it's Indy.

Now look at Bernard (and Hoagie and Laverne). They're defined as much by their physical shape as they are by the colors used in them. It's as if someone realized that trying to bring about photorealism in 1992 using VGA graphics wasn't gonna work, and a call to more basic colors would be preferable until graphics improved further. The ones on the left you recognize primarily by their colors, the ones on the right primarily by their physical shape, even though both aspects play together in every case. (I'm not even gonna comment on the mutant on the far left, though.)

I'll be the first to admit that all of this is just a theory, but it's not one I'm just pulling out of my ass.

 

[MRY]

Well, I've long felt -- more or less since I played Chrono Trigger back in the early 90s -- that an utterly important thing in defining characters in video games is that they have distinctive silhouettes. So I think we're on the same page.

Ben Chandler did an interesting piece about this, though to me some of the silhouettes he identifies as super distinct are not very distinct.
https://adventuregamers.com/articles/view/33008

 

[Unkillable Cat]

The concept of the silhouette and a easily recognizable physical shape was also prevalent in the graphical design of Team Fortress 2... until Valve realized that they could make money off of all those hats and loot crates.

Then all such ideas went out the windows, so now you got Engineers and Pyros looking like Soldiers and whatnot.

 

[Lady_Error]

Notable titles from this era:

Day of the Tentacle (1993)
Sam & Max Hit the Road
Full Throttle (1995)

Monkey Island 1+2
Indy 4

Those are probably still among the best adventure games ever made.

 

[jfrisby]

Some of that 320x200 artwork looks less cartoony if it's in the proper 4:3 aspect. That Lucasarts character graphic looks to have a mix of corrected and uncorrected sprites.