215 Shooting Game Heroes

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215 Shooting Game Heroes

Collected for your amusement.

(Administrator) 2010-05-18, 22:06 #1

Member since May 2011 · 2173 posts · Location: Brisbane
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Subject: 215 Shooting Game Heroes

I don't remember why, but a few days ago I wondered what the history of vertical shooters would look like. I decided to gather every vertical shooter player sprite I could find, based on these criteria:

Shooting upwards only (no rotating weapons)

Static or vertically scrolling screens

Sprites only, no vektors or polygons

And so, using MAME, I went through every single vertical shooter, and ripped the player sprites from them. I didn't get them all, many games - especially later releases - had more than one to choose from. I picked one that looked best.

There are some strange ones in the list: Spy Hunter's a driving game, but the car also shoots. Most of them though are exactly what you'd expect: cool flying ships of every description.

Click to view the entire set or read on for...

NFG's Vertical Shooter Sprite History!! Yay! Woo! Etc!

BLEARGH

(Administrator) 2010-05-18, 22:26 #2

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Subject: Phase One: Monochrome

For cost and technical reasons the first games were monochromatic. In 1978 there wasn't much going on, and these 12 games cover more than two years of arcade progress.

[Image: http://nfgworld.com/grafx/games/shmupsprite1.png]

Vertical shooters started off with a thunderous bang: Space Invaders hit the world so hard cabinets overflowed with money, arcades that couldn't get one faced severe business losses, and clones and knockoffs arrived almost immediately. For a while every similar game looked just like the rest, with changes limited to different sprites. When the gameplay itself started to change, it was usually for the worse, and for a while there were only two games: Space Invaders, or crap.

These first gen ships all looked more or less the same 'cause they were all from more or less the same games. Displays of the time were monochrome, whatever colours were offered came from plastic sheets taped to black and white monitors.

Happily, the B/W era didn't last long.

I omitted all of the clones and bootlegs, 'cause there's just no point seeing twenty of the same sprite over and over.

BLEARGH

This post was edited on 2010-05-18, 22:58 by NFG.

(Administrator) 2010-05-18, 23:00 #3

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Subject: Phase Two: CGA Graphics

The second wave had multiple colours. With more knowledge and better, cheaper hardware, fully 8 shades were available to game makers. PC gamers might recognize the CGA palette, made from the simplest colour combinations.

[Image: http://nfgworld.com/grafx/games/shmupspritecga.png]

The CGA palette. More or less.

Each of the three primary colours could either be on or off, so red or green, or red and green for yellow. Green and blue for cyan, and so on. Turn 'em all on and get white, all off for black, and some would add a simple circuit for half-brightness to get dim versions of the same colours. With this kind of all-or-nothing primitive power, it's no wonder so many games of the era were so garish.

[Image: http://nfgworld.com/grafx/games/shmupsprite2.png]

These were seriously ugly games.

And the sprites got bigger too, sometimes much bigger, but the games were rarely better for it. Some of these monstrosities are very tall indeed, and it seems the game makers - or at least Namco - recognized how retarded this looked. Subsequent games went back to a more reasonable size.

BLEARGH

This post was edited on 2010-05-18, 23:05 by NFG.

(Administrator) 2010-05-18, 23:15 #4

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Subject: Phase Three: Our Ancestors

Around 1982 things started to get interesting, and many games released around this period will be recognizable to modern players. It started with Namco's Xevious, a remarkably simple and boring game by today's standards, but with a very stylish design.

[Image: http://nfgworld.com/grafx/games/shmupsprite3.png]

This is where the good stuff started.

These modern sprites started to look like things. The CGA generation was still kind of nauseatingly unattractive, but Xevious introduced a whole new level of reality to shooters. This is well and truly where our modern shooters started getting awesome.

BLEARGH

This post was edited on 2010-05-18, 23:56 by NFG.

(Administrator) 2010-05-18, 23:55 #5

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Subject: Phase Four: The Modern Age

Along with increased hardware specs came sprites that looked a lot like real-world things. Helicopters, jet fighters, riflemen, guys on motorbikes, dragons and little winged dudes.

[Image: http://nfgworld.com/grafx/games/shmupsprite4.png]

Most of us have seen these things for reals.

It was a great time to be playing these games. Each new game looked better than the last, and with a real history behind the genre the artists could build upon what had come before. Naturally this led to some copying, but more often it led to graphic evolution.

BLEARGH

(Administrator) 2010-05-19, 00:17 #6

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Subject: Phase Five: The Glorious Future

In the late eighties two-dimensional videogame hardware had more or less reached its peak. Game sprites could now be as big as designers wanted, and include as many colours as they could imagine. It was a real golden age, with a new game seemingly released every week. There was absolutely no limit to the awesome things you'd see in an arcade.

[Image: http://nfgworld.com/grafx/games/shmupsprite5.png]

Flying people, dragon riders, X-wing ships, fairies, witches on broomsticks, single wings, bi-wings, F-15s and F-18s, rocket cars... It was glorious.

And then it all came crashing down. All the old companies died off as the shooting genre lost its lustre. Those that remained turned away from the tired old sprites of old, lured away by the siren call of 3D graphics. Companies like Toaplan became Cave and started making games with pre-rendered 3D sprites. Takumi made Giga Wing with sprites, but Giga Wing 2 used polygons. Eighting, Raizing, Seibu, Irem... Well, they're all pretty much gone now, or they've given up on sprites.

This short history of shooting game sprites pretty much covers the too-short span of a great genre.

BLEARGH

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