Certain brands, a precious few, hold great significance and such is the power of their indulgence in our hearts we know the breadth of their canon by a name.
AM 2 would count for me, as would all of those numeral arcade departments from SEGA. Treasure would be another one. You didn’t need to know anything about the genre the title lived in if it had been crafted by Treasure, same rules for Codemasters.
Then there would be Namco. No need to know any more. You didn’t even need to see whatever luscious full–motion video adorned the front end of their latest PlayStation release. Those guys had made it. Of course, from my own personal history, they were also something of an enemy, being a broad and unrepentant 90’s SEGA junkie, as I still am. But every champion needs a proper combatant and Namco, they certainly competed, and how.
It is fair to say within the realm of the home console market and their deal with Sony, they were champions with merciless victories abound. But the arcade was a different weight division. Another champion hung around there, but that is a story for another time because I would like to hold our attention upon Namco alone and specifically the charisma of their 90’s render design and the ice–cool mood of their atmosphere.
Insert fifty pence to continue.
Back in the early doors of the nineties, rendered artwork emblazoned its way into our eyes via things like Edge, who would regularly adorn the cover of their magazine with renders that not even the production team of Lawnmower Man would consider good taste. Shiny grotesqueries abound, at least until things began to pick up a few years down the line when rendered art became fairly ubiquitous in arcades and game boxes alike.
They weren’t lifelike but in some cases, they were accruing style. Ridge Racer’s cabinet displayed a California Soul-on-Ecstasy façade, Virtua Fighter 2 gave us bright, blocky people and Daytona USA had that music. It had renders too, but you couldn’t see anything over that racket. Then there was Tekken, whose dead-eyed mannequins captured something genuinely sincere and dangerous about the game. The characters from Street Fighter all looked like they were down for a good time, but the guys and gals from Tekken looked like they’d properly take you out. Right out. In Kazuya’s case, all while wearing a purple dinner suit.
They rode that wave of adult adolescent entertainment that Akira had got going some years prior and draped the art direction in bronze-rich textures alongside that Yakuza cool. By the time Tekken arrived home, following Ridge Racer, Namco had stamped themselves all over the holistics of PlayStation. And from that never could you separate them as games like Tekken 2 kept the mood coming and dressed the art in better textures and sharper fittings. If SEGA were the bright skies above a mountain lake, then Namco were the neon glare above a city. Even the promotional art for Soul Edge looked crisp and that was historical, of a high-kicking, hard-slashing fashion.
I suppose this would be a reasonable point to stop and recognise that the actual games would fall short of the glossy renders that pervaded advertisements and magazines, but that was never the point. The art set a tone that is similar to turning the opening pages of Lord of the Rings and being exposed to Tolkien’s map of Middle Earth. They place you into the world, with gameplay filling in the closer details like words did for Mr Tolkien. And nobody did this better than Namco.
Nintendo seemed to struggle making the required transition from pencil to computer and titles like Mario Kart 64 featured rendered artwork which looked more apropos to an ice cream kiosk price list, than for selling the most disappointing follow–up of the time. Perhaps that was the point. I can’t say they ever asked me about it. Even my beloved SEGA wobbled all over the place like a drunk in a saddle. On the one side. their arcade games tended to go for a deliberately polygonal look that had unmatched congruity with the games themselves, but the stuff they shunted out to promote things like Sonic R looked like boiled sweets that had been left to sit under a hot sun. You might stare in curiosity but you wouldn’t touch them. You wouldn’t even feed one to your dog.
This brings us up to today’s offerings, or it would if that rendered fire hadn’t long since burned out. Really, what is the point when the fidelity of modern graphics is so high as to not require a render to sell the game in the first place? One day, graphics will be so good that you won’t even need eyes to see them. What a day.
Until then, the high–quality art from the likes of Namco still matters, and not just historically. They point to a thematic of seeing beyond what can be achieved and perhaps my broad disaffection for modern games is the sense that the industry has long since arrived. Where it had once fought for attention from the darkened corner of a bedroom, gaming has long since migrated downstairs and taken the form of hideous throne boxes which presume the adulation of their flock.
Perhaps I am being a little dramatic, and it is at least fair to say that once you escape the menu mazes of your modern game, many are superb. Not the modern fighting games, of course, they are dreadful, even Tekken. And have you seen the renders of the new games? The belles, whistles and whatever else they can throw onto a character’s costume. Philanthropic bone breaker King has managed to go from jaguar head and purple pantaloons in Tekken to Power Ranger by Tekken 7. To where did the ice–cool neon go and can we please at least flirt with the idea of calling it back?
Not to imply that things should look old and dead–eyed but surely the artists can find a better sense of place and tone than this? It is as if they do not believe or have otherwise lost the essence of the Iron Fist Tournament. These things can happen and let’s not any of us think we are above that ourselves. So, here I am defending my old enemy, harkening to a time when hi–fidelity visuals were for the future and signposted by rendered artwork which knew the road ahead.
One can only now assume we have either disembarked or else forgotten the destination. If it is the latter then we can at least be certain that Namco never pointed us the wrong way on their watch, even if they were my enemy. Bandai Namco though, the eye of my justification turns upon you…
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