Video: The Sprite Tape Mystery

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6q6SXzmcqPY

Hi everyone. I have once again put more effort into a video than the topic necessarily deserved, hopefully to your benefit.

Note: For some reason, this video will not convert to 4K. Since the majority of my viewers are vocally uninterested in 4K, I'll probably just release it like this. Youtube claims it will "eventually" finish and become available at full res, but I'm not holding my breath and wanted to get at least a few hours of early access.

I received these tapes from a viewer (thanks f15sim! I will finally return these to you this week! sorry it took so long!) and was immediately captivated by their contents - for about an hour, at which point I'd pretty much figured out everything they were about, except what they were for, which turned out to be a much more protracted and unsatisfying deep dive, which didn't quite turn up the hard facts I'd hoped for.

It took me a while to figure out how to make a video about it, because all I really have are the tapes - which contain about two hours of footage, only about two minutes of which is interesting enough to show on screen - and very tenuous connections to possible projects, none of which were documented enough to present outright. Literally, I think I found three articles, total, on the "game" that I believe these were used for; no screenshots.

With so little data available, I eventually decided that the best way to cover it would be to talk about the way that games like this one were made, and what the context of its creation would probably have looked like. That ended up being curiously tedious.

It turns out that the "digitized sprites" era of videogames was shorter than I thought. I was only really able to dig up a few games - mostly fighters - that used the actual photographic technique. Of those, only a couple used human actors, others used clay or models, and lots of games that people apply the term to arguably don't count.

I didn't want to rant about it in the video, but I don't understand what makes Donkey Kong Country or Killer Instinct "digitized." Their sprites are pixels created on a computer, and the only difference is whether they were created by hand or with a 3D renderer. "Digitized" means you took something analog and made it digital - that kinda has to be a photograph, so if you're coming from a 3D render, what are you "digitizing?" Weird!

I also found out that of the few actual photographic-digitized games I could come up with, only about two of them (Mortal Kombat and Gabriel Knight 2) have any sprite rips or behind the scenes footage available. The only other examples I could think of were things like first person adventure games e.g. Lost In Time, which didn't really have any sprites, and were more like "still FMV" if you will, and none of them have making-of videos.

Anyway, that's why I sprite-ified myself. Made it a lot easier to illustrate my points. I did a lot more poses that aren't in the video; keep an eye out for a sprite sheet if I ever decide to make it.