2D DOT GAME HEROES: OR: A LESSON IN CUSTOM SPRITES

[GRIMglamfire]

From the years 2005 to 20013 I was an active poster on http://spriters-resource.com
During this time I was witness to the highest point of pixelart as a community scene on the internet.
I will SHARE KNOWLEDGE with you of this time.

One of the more interesting aspects of pixelart is how most people started on the forum - this was primarily in the days of terrible fucking sprite comics. Like really bad sprite comics oh my god you have no clue. The Spriters Resource (then known as Pixteltendo R.I.P) had a custom comics board and it would put the worst creative cesspools on the internet to shame.

Most sprite comics used pre existing sprites ripped from games. Joining the community after using a sprite sheet, or just being interested in game sprites motivated most of the users to join. Me - i’d actually been banned from the other four emulation forums I frequented. It was a really awful comic I wont even mention by name that interested me in creating custom sprites. I wouldn’t even actually try my hand at it for years after I joined and I never took it very far!

A custom sprite doesn’t necessarily mean that it was completely made by hand. A lot of times they used other sprites as a base, called an Edit. In most cases though, edits quickly gave way to people figuring out the elements of a particular games style. Some game’s had more lasting power than others. As an example: Tales of The World and Fire Emblem, Megaman Zero and Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories.

As a pecularity, most of these custom sprites usually were associated with a certain time period. As games would come out or be discovered through emulation people would start out trying to emulate the way they looked.
It’s funny that it was such a big deal to us - beyond being hosted on the site, none of these sprites would ever actually be used for anything.

Lavos Spawn - Tales of the World

Kid - Tales of the World Style

MU - Custom Sprite

Cloud Strife - Fire Emblem Style

Vincent Valentine - Kingdom Hearts Chain of Memories

SolBadguy - Tales of the world (seeing a theme here? told u)

Black Mage - Fire Emblem Style

Terra Branford - Custom Sprite

Travis Touchdown - Legend of Princess Edit

*Ganondorf - Fire Emblem Style

Mario Stage - Smash Brothers

Samus Aran - Megaman Zero Style (I used to fawn over this)

These are just some of the stuff I could post! Actually, a lot of the things I enjoyed a lot more than this can no longer be found online because they’re no longer available through photobucket or imgshack. There was a host of really good sprites and pixelart from these days that would go un uploaded.

I will also be posting a history lesson in this thread.

[creep]

Thanks for this. I despair at the beautiful work lost from sites like TSR and TIGSource and such, little of it backed up by the Internet Archive due to the image hosts involved.

Tales of the World ND 2/3 customs make sense, the series is already full of design adaptations from the franchise and other Namco stuff (actually, a franchise conversion of 3 could be cool). Chain of Memories is a bit less obvious, I suppose a mix of the devoted fan base, the distinct/attractive nature of the visuals and the maddening lack of real content. I am amused and depressed by the thought of time spent making sprites for the largely insipid, aimless story sequences.

Is that whole Card Saga Wars thing tied to the hip with TSR, or is it mostly independent?

[VastleCania]

I’m loving this. Some of the most interesting things to me are obscure creations that don’t get used or displayed anywhere but a small community - things created for a time and a place and otherwise forgotten. I’m glad that we randomly started talking about this in Discord

Look at this, it’s flipping Vector the Crocodile in Mario Kart style.

[GRIMglamfire]

Card Saga wars was birthed out of TSR for the most part! SmithyGCN was a spriter that was super active in that style and laid the foundation for how it was suppose dto look.

[Khan]

It really does hurt me that we’ve lost so many sprites to image hosting sites. Such a shame.

While I didn’t post on TSR much, I was rather active on a forum called Sinhra. It was mostly focused on 2D Fighting game sprites, and the whole forum was working together on a M.U.G.E.N MvC game done in a CvS spriting style, with entirely original sprites. While we never finished, it was a whole lot of fun. Unfortunately, the site no longer exists.

[Mikey]

What’s a guy gotta do to get started in Romhacking anyway

[GRIMglamfire]

MUGEN sprites are actually really interesting, because despite the huge amount of custom work and edits involved in the MUGEN, none of them were ever really archived anywhere.

[r-i]

[spoiler]I ran a Mugen wiki for a few years in 2006-ish but a spambot problem destroyed what very few contributions others would impose, every community already wanted to have its own luring showcase database, and the weird random person who was hosting the whole thing disappeared with the site not five years later. I made a bare-bones spreadsheet back-up from some slapdash work notes and then never really returned to the medium as the completely-scattered nature plus old ancient drama made another uniting attempt feel worthless…

I could probably seek out a few ancient highlights if desired, though I doubt there are easily visible spreadsheets for them. Borghi’s stuff is obvious and famous, but there’s also the weirdness (and previous frustrated allegations of stolen programming) for DDR / Telechy and Warner? The standards-less Wikia probably has some interesting-in-vile-fascination records for weird unique custom sprite use under “spriteswapping”.[/spoiler]

[GRIMglamfire]

HIST. CHAPT 1

Most people my age around this time, probably like 10-13 came to places like pixilation with one of two things, or both

1. A Complete lack of any artistic ability
2. An admiration for popular people who were making comics

Spurned on by the low barrier of entry that came with making a comic out of videogame sprites entirely, our interests came from websites like
http://Planetzebeth.com (still updating I think)
Fireball 20xl, Game Jumpers, Captain - N, Bob and George and probably a hundred other videogame based sprite comics that were wildly different in tone, from serious attempts at drama to goofy randumb humor. The quality went all over the place, but it was pretty widely accepted that Bob & George was the highest quality out of most of them. I wonder whatever happened to that guy; did he reach the success elsewhere he was looking for as a writer?

mental note: do a series of interviews catching up with these sprite comic people

anyway, so I came to The Spriters Resource back then when it was known as Pixeltendo, a sort of indie community for pixelartists with a chilled out vibe. I immediately seated myself as the biggest troll/shitposter I possibly could: Widely reviled by the older crowd at once and adored by the younger members. Needless to say, for a talentless teenager who couldn’t do shit, it was a pretty good position!

It was actually from failing to make sprite comics of any quality that I decided to eventually start ripping and making custom sprites. I don’t think any of my sprite edits from them are still around.

But the leaders on the forum were: Dazz, Johnathan-EX, Bacon, Badassbill, Jordan, Rogultgot and Jiggy

I think the last two eventually just went to college or something. Johnathan-EX was replaced by people better at giving criticism and making Pixelart and I don’t honestly think his ego could handle it. Jordan was a posh british kid from the upper crust who was deeply naïve with a huge ego. Dazz was somewhere between Jordan and Johnathan always, but managed to keep his personality relevant by being nice to people and trying his hand at pixelart.

I think this was close to when Pixelart was in “full swing” in the 2000’s. GBA/NEO-GEO/Snes/Genesis/Saturn/Ps1 emulation had been all but cracked by this point and people were ripping large amounts of sprites and we were being exposed to ridiculous amounts of really interesting game art. This was way before websites like Hardcore Gaming 101 could expose people to lesser known games: we were learning these console libraries by forcefully playing them and archiving their art.

[VastleCania]

I remember the days of “download a random ROM and play it.” I worked through a good chunk of the SNES library on a 56K modem this way. My favorite was a really dumb game called Vs. Collection which had a sort of proto-Smash Bros. minigame that I used to play with one of my friends for hours.