Drawn art that blinds and stupefies

temnix · December 4, 2021

I was looking through an old games website in search of something to play, and I came across an adventure by a Sierra company, Dinamix, called "Heart of China." The screenshots I glanced at were attractive and the review did not mention any special difficulties aside from some arcade sequences, which, as it would turn out, I could even skip. So I thought, this should be nice and simple enough. Point-and-click. I had done that. And that is how the game turned out to be, an adventure with a context-sensitive cursor for picking up items, combining them in the inventory, applying them outside, talking to people in a menu - all of the invisible defaults for adventure games. I did not appreciate or notice the game's release year - 1991, all of those quests with familiar controls would be made a good five years later. This one's manual actually had to explain that the game is not controlled via a parser. So there was a lot of striking innovation there, in fact, but that is not what made an impact on me, nor the game's loose plot, which only just begins in China, certainly nor the dialogues that get weaker and cornier by the minute. Because of all that I gave up before very long, but all that is irrelevant. What blasted into me were the game screens, the backgrounds against which the action unfolded. They were drawn by hand, like in many other games before tiling and 3D came along... Baldur's Gate uses tiling in places with identical tress, by the way... but those screens were drawn, and how! The skill was unbelievable, the immersion, even ethnographic detail complete! Some of the images look so true, so correct that I had to wonder if they weren't copied from some photographs of, say, Tibet circa the beginning of the 20th century, but they couldn't have been. Not likely.

To repeat, I have played adventures and Sierra adventures, I have seen nice backgrounds, original backgrounds, apt backgrounds. A lot of cartooney backgrounds, ranging from nicely unusual to predictably simplified. The sort of scenery I remember from "King's Quest" or "Quest for Glory" doesn't require that much skill, although by today's standards it may impress. And I wrote about "The Blade of Destiny" on this board not long ago, though that is neither a Sierra game nor an adventure. Still, it's adequate. Lots of games were adequate. Some kind of dude with a sword, looking more or less convincing against a tower. But there is still a long gap between that level and what I saw in this game, which just took me aback. My eyes were blinded with the light from the painted skies, the shades of scattered miscellanea, animated bystanders talking and nodding their heads were absolutely transporting. I ended up saving screenshots with an external program so I could look at those pictures later, but I find it incredible that artists of this caliber could be available in dozens - yes, that's about how many are listed in the credits here - to work on nothing more than a videogame. We are not talking about a Frank Frazetta alone in the world here. Apparently people who could paint such things - they had to paint these pieces, how else? - were in plentiful supply. Apparently this was the level you could order from industry professionals, because I don't think that these people burned out and slit their wrists after submitting these screens. They probably got paid, bought a little vacation for the family, then sat down to make another thing, no worse. This boggles the mind, because I can't think of any game today, whether AAA or AAAAAAAAA, that could feature this kind of true mastery. Compared to this, modern games that get praised for their "execution" are done by cube-shaped fingerless daltonics.

Sometimes the designers used living people for models, there is a lot of embedded photography of actors there, but mostly for cutscenes or close-ups. This accounts for some of the finesse, but only for some. The actors are made to blend so well with the background that usually there is no telling who has been captured and who - drawn. There are some less convincing exceptions in a few places, but the impression is still tremendous.

On the first picture the scarf is animated and waving in the wind, by the way - not an easy detail to draw.