Of monsters and sprites

After I found the first video game bead creations, which I had used as a model for my own creations, lacking in accuracy I turned my eye to the game sprites.

And just for clarification, I’m not trying to imply that all the characters people have made from beads are inaccurate. I’m sure that most of them are exactly like the ones in the original games. I just had bad luck picking those that weren’t =)

For those of you who don’t know, a sprite is a two-dimensional image used in computer graphics. That's the gist of it, but if you want to know more check out the fancy description in Wikipedia. Character’s every position has its own sprite. For example see this sprite sheet of Mario from SMB 1 (image from mariomayhem.com). 
 

Google is great help when you’re searching for sprites. Just type the name of the game or the name of the character and sprites and there will be plenty of results. I have come to favour this site spriters-resource.com, when I need a sprite, but I still use google from time to time. It’s good to remember that these aren’t the original sprites, but something that people have ripped from the games by themselves. So the sprites aren’t infallible and if something looks odd it’s good thing to double check it from a different source.

First thing I made using a sprite as a model was Shy Guy from SMB 2. Main reason for choosing it was that I had the colours required to make it.

Second one was Samus from Metroid. It also had so basic colours that I could make it. With Samus I had another problem though: my pegboard was too small for all the standing Samuses. That’s why I had to make sitting Samus, but it actually turned out to be pretty cool.

At this point it was very clear to me that I had to do some shopping. Ikea’s selection wasn’t nearly good enough. They had only ten colours and you couldn’t connect the pegboards. Luckily a local arts and crafts store had some Hama beads and interlocking pegboards. My colour collection grew from ten to about twenty and now the biggest image I could make was 58 x 58 instead of the measly 29 x 29.

With the new colours I made Metroid from the first Metroid game…

…and some characters from Final Fantasy III. The skin tone of the white mage and the red mage isn’t quite right, but at that point I didn’t care anymore. I just wanted to make something.

That’s all for today. In the next episode: Moar colours!

Where it all began

Some time ago, in not so distant past, my girlfriend brought home from Ikea some Pyssla beads. My first thoughts were along the lines: “What crap is this?? A box of plastic trash…”

I just hope I'm not supposed to build any furniture out of these.

But the beads turned out to be pretty nice entertainment. I’ve never been too much into arts, but I’ve always liked patterns. In school, for example, I never liked drawing unless we were supposed to draw geometric shapes or 3D objects with straight lines like cubes, pyramids and rectangles. I think that is what I liked in my first encounter with beads. I was creating patterns and I didn’t even have to use pen. And if I made a mistake or didn’t like the way the shape was forming, I could just remove the bad-looking beads and continue from there. So we ended having a blast. We drank some beer and made coasters out of the beads.

Then I accidentally made a swastika...

Soon after the first experiment with the beads I realised that I could do so much more than just some random geometric shapes. After all, the old video games used very simple graphics and I could recreate all my favourite characters from Super Mario Bros., Final Fantasy, Metroid, Zelda, Chrono Trigger, Donkey Kong…! Only the sky would be the limit (or the quantity of those early video games made)!

I could not have been more wrong. With only the ten colours that came in the Pyssla box I couldn’t recreate… well I don’t want to say anything, but it comes close. I did some digging through the internet and found out that other people also had had the same idea: There were plenty of different video game characters made of beads. Some even fitted in my colour palette. So I chose as my first project Koopa Troopa from first Super Mario Bros.

I was so proud of myself

I quickly added two other Super Mario characters, Boo (the ghost) and Super Mushroom (you know the basic mushroom that makes Mario grow), and a black mage from Final Fantasy series to my collection before I realized that I had been cheated. That's not Koopa Troopa from Super Mario Bros. It's not Koopa from any of Mario games (though it is quite close to the one in Super Mario Bros. 3). And neither were my Boo, Mushroom or the black mage accurate to their original games. Someone had made his/her own versions of those characters and they weren’t similar to the originals. So I vowed that I would not make the same mistake again. I would go to the source itself. I would find the original sprites and I would base my recreations to those! (But more of that in the next post.)