It was pseudo-3D, I remember reading an article about how they made the sprites, but can’t find that… wikipedia has
Donkey Kong Country was one of the first games for a mainstream home video game console to use pre-rendered 3D graphics
and they used SGI workstations to create the models and animations before compressing/converting them to 2D sprites
Rare invested their NES profit in Silicon Graphics, Inc. (SGI) Challenge workstations with Alias rendering software to render 3D models. It was a significant risk, as each workstation cost £80,000.
(sharing bc I thought that’s a crazy amount of money for 1992)
It used isometric 3D since the SNES lacked any 3D capability.
It was made by the same people that did those isometric games on 8 bit computers, Ashby Computer Graphics, aka Ultimate, which changed their name to Rare.
IMO, that’s all a part of the Rare+Nintendo hype at the time. Killer Instinct was in the same campaign for these pre-rendered 3D graphics as the wave of the future. Don’t forget, they had to go toe-to-toe with Sony’s Playstationat that time, so bringing anything that looked like real 3D on a SNES was kind of a big deal.
Killer Instinct was one of the flagship titles for the Ultra 64, running on next Gen hardware in the arcade. The SNES version was basically a demake to get a 64 bit game to run on 16 bit hardware, which is a pretty big technical marvel if you ask me.
Anyone tell that fool that CRTs were literally the only kind of TV that existed at the time
Admittedly, this game doesn’t look particularly good on a CRT, either.
The hype about the visuals being “3D” was so weird and misinformed, and you could absolutely tell at the time.
It was pseudo-3D, I remember reading an article about how they made the sprites, but can’t find that… wikipedia has
and they used SGI workstations to create the models and animations before compressing/converting them to 2D sprites
(sharing bc I thought that’s a crazy amount of money for 1992)
Meanwhile, Nintendo positioned this method to compete with Aladdin, which simply hired Walt Disney animators to do the sprites.
It used isometric 3D since the SNES lacked any 3D capability.
It was made by the same people that did those isometric games on 8 bit computers, Ashby Computer Graphics, aka Ultimate, which changed their name to Rare.
IMO, that’s all a part of the Rare+Nintendo hype at the time. Killer Instinct was in the same campaign for these pre-rendered 3D graphics as the wave of the future. Don’t forget, they had to go toe-to-toe with Sony’s Playstationat that time, so bringing anything that looked like real 3D on a SNES was kind of a big deal.
Killer Instinct was one of the flagship titles for the Ultra 64, running on next Gen hardware in the arcade. The SNES version was basically a demake to get a 64 bit game to run on 16 bit hardware, which is a pretty big technical marvel if you ask me.
Still have my OG Black cartridge!