From 1994 to 1996 I worked as a graphics artist at Funcom, the largest game developer in Norway. My main job there was lead artist on the game Winter Gold (or FX Skiing as it was called in Europe). The game was made for the SNES console (Super Famicom) from Nintendo. The SNES wasn't really made for 3D vector graphics, but Argonaut had developed an extra chip called the SuperFX that we put into the game cartridge. The game backgrounds and video were converted into vector graphics, very much the same way that some Flash video is done today. Thanks to the wonders of modern emulation technology, I have managed to get some screengrabs from the game.
Additional artwork by Dennis Hansen and Daniel Staver .
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Above are some grabs from the menu system. Behind the icons and text we put up vectorized video of dancing girls and action clips from the events. The dancing girls were very inappropriate for the game, but the kids liked it! All the sports stuff was animated in 3D. The end results looked so good, people who saw it thought they were converted from video - and not animated in 3D. They don't look that impressive today, and I doubt they'll fool anyone now.
On the right you see the player configuration screen - a must for any sports game. If you ever play it, notice that the colours you select come from the Commodore 64 palette. A nerdy detail, but things like that make it more fun to do.
One detail I still like is the little "Winter Gold" logo up in the corner. I thought it would make the game feel like a television sports broadcast. I still find that incredibly clever of me :)
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Here are some grabs from the events themselves. The backgrounds, as mentioned above, were vectorized movies converted from 3D renderings. They were done in 3D Studio Dos on standard PCs, but the characters and the horizon images were done using Alias Poweranimator on SGI a workstation. Nintendo provided the kick-ass hardware and software, which cost a staggering $50.000 at the time. The SGI was a huge noisy monster, and featured super-fast 3D hardware long before the PC even went in that direction. I was the only one at Funcom sitting on this nuclear reactor of a machine, which explains why nobody liked me there. You could almost say that I've gone downhill in regards to high-end machines and software since then! :)
We wanted to avoid the on-rails gameplay you usually end up with when making games that play over video backgrounds. We made an inventive track-system that made it possible to construct an infinite number of courses out of eight different parts. All we did was to have some similar frames on each sequence, so that we could use that as a transition into a new part of the track.
It was really tough marrying the characters into the stylized backgrounds, but it doesn't look that strange when it all starts moving. It even looks kind of trendy today, with the recent boom of minimalistic and retro-styled 3D. As you can see dudes, we were there first :)
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