Secret Snail Maze

Pencil to Pixel: Metal Slader Glory

HAL was looking for someone that could do pixel art. Even though I had very little experience, I wanted to do it, so I volunteered. They prepared a desk for me at their main office, which in those days was located in Kanda near Akihabara.

I’d take this drawing and although they aren’t as high resolution as the scanners of today, we had something called a Digitiser which you would feed it into. It was a pretty terrible recreation but it would be displayed in the drawing tool so I could use it as a base to draw the pixel art.

I had to keep adjusting the black lines without losing the impact of the picture, or place lighter complimentary colours around the black areas. Alternatively, I could just reduce the pixels and the form of the original line. It was after experimenting in this that I arrived upon the method known as anti-aliasing. I think that’s where I really started to learn the skills of pixel art.

Metal Slader Glory Developer Interview (Peter Barnard, Shumpalations)

Pre-release screenshot from Mario Party 9 showing a minigame that does not exist in the final game, seemingly revolving around two players needing to catch Bowser Jr. in a large 2D room inspired by the bonus rooms from New Super Mario Bros. Wii.

In the finished game, the minigame "Zoom Room" revolves around a similar concept of two players needing to catch Bowser Jr., except taking place in a 3D maze instead of a 2D screen.

Source: RHG1951

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