Slideshow Cutscene (Concept)

Slideshow Cutscene

CONCEPT

The limitations of early gaming hardware, especially in the 8-bit and 16-bit days, made animated story sequences impractical for many games. One popular alternative was to convey the story through a series of still images, often with text and music alongside them.

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Overview

This cutscene technique was mostly used during the 8-bit to 16-bit era. It is still used today by the visual novel genre, and, to an extent, adventure games.

History

See also: In-engine Cinematic

In 1985, Squaresoft (Company)'s Will: The Death Trap II (1985), created by Hironobu Sakauchi, was considered a technical breakthrough for its use of animated bitmap graphics (predating the GIF animated bitmap format by two years) to render real-time animated cutscenes, a technique that would later be used in many later video games.

In 1986, Sakaguchi's Death Trap (Franchise) successor Alpha (Game) improved on the real-time animated cutscene technique of Will. Alpha was considered a technical marvel for further advancing this real-time animated cutscene technique in the form of animated bitmap graphics. This gave it some of the best graphics and animations available up until that time.

The success of Squaresoft's Will and Alpha in the Japanese computer game industry soon led to many other video game series also using this technique to render real-time, in-engine animated cutscenes, including Valis (Franchise), Ys (Franchise), Snatcher (Franchise), Ninja Gaiden (Franchise), Far East of Eden, and Lunar (Franchise), among others.

While uncommon today, the slideshow technique is still used quite often in the visual novel and adventure game genres. Because it evokes the classics of the 8-bit era, many deliberately retro games use it as well.

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