Nostalgia's a beautiful thing, but trying to beautifully recreate it with a modern coat of paint is a painstaking endeavour, it turns out.
Darren Rafferty, an animation student from Ireland, has been hard at work recreating the opening to Pokémon Silver, a game from Pokémon's second generation of titles which launched for the Game Boy Color back in 1999. The opening scenes have been completely reanimated, starring a number of different Pokémon across a variety of scenes.
In total, the project took a whopping 300-400 hours. "I wanted this to feel like a living, breathing world, as opposed to just an animation," Rafferty says. "And I think it turned out alright, it's still far from perfect though. Personally I really like the underwater bit where you can see the surface of the water from underneath, thought that looked well."
Check it out:
Pretty, huh? For the sake of comparison, here's the original:
Why Charizard gets to take centre stage in an animation for a new generation of Pokémon is beyond us, but there we are.
If we ever do get a Pokémon Let's Go Johto game on Switch, we sure hope it gets treated to a nicely redone opening like this. Let us know what you think in the comments below.
Comments 24
this is cute!
Ok, I need to say more, this is stinking adorable
And that is why I never even bothered trying. Often have I thought of creating my own "cutscene" animations, but man, 300 hours for 50 seconds of animation...
It's a good thing I didn't even try.
Not the most efficient creator but a good one netherless! Now use that on Pokemon Crystal remake! By the way the guy deserves some support for his effort. Better than spend it in some random hottie on onlyfans
Looks great....but 300-400 hours? He could have done it in 3D in less time.
Looks lovely, if only Pokemon could return to old school 2D art once more, just for a change of pace if nothing else.
Whilst it's nice, that probably shouldn't have taken 300 hours to draw those particular assets with limited animation, and a blueprint of what you're recreating.
That time taken is probably indicative of learning the software and how to make it, on top of making it.
@Daniel36 Efficent creators can do it in a few hours.
Why does it seem like it's only impressive if you know how many hours the creator spent doing it?
@RazumikhinPG I think they're just trying to show the effort and dedication that went into it...but in this case it must be a little embarrassing.
Why yes, I WILL take a morning dose of nostalgia! Don't know how many times I watched the original animation.
I didn't remember Charizard at all and I'm with Ryan in "why is he even there???" Though, if you analyze it, except for the 3 starters and the legendary, every other pokemon is from 1st gen
I feel conflicted...
I mean this is lovely, and I love supporting fellow artists, but it always ever so slightly bothers me when people trace over existing artwork or just copy it. I know at least the Charizard and Chikorita (minus the slightly altered mouth), are almost 1 to 1 replicas of the official artwork (not the sprites).
It doesn't make the person any less talented I suppose, but at least for me personally it takes away some of the originally/appeal of the work.
@Bobb even though the gen II games are my favorite, I’ve always felt they didn’t do as good of a job at marketing/introducing the new Pokémon as some of the later games did. You see it in-game too, with a lot of really cool Pokémon (Houndour, Larvitar, etc.) not even being available until the post game.
My guess is they were trying to include the most iconic Pokémon in the Gold/Silver intro since Pikachu, Charizard, Jigglypuff, and Lapras are/were some of the most popular gen I Pokémon. But it felt like a missed chance to highlight some of the newer ones.
laughing out loud at the comments on how long it took this guy to do what he did vs seasoned artists.
bah! lets see ya'll do it urselves
"I wanted this to feel like a living, breathing world"
Gamefreak strongly disagrees
@Ventilator Yeah but I would have to become efficient first and I am already doing that with music software, so... not enough hours in the day haha.
You haven't noticed Charizard being shoehorned into everything almost as much as Pikachu?
@Daniel36 Hehe. I'm better at making music than gfx too.
@Ventilator Cool. What kind of stuff do you make?
One thing I always missed in the remakes is the old intro and music...
@Daniel36 I used Protracker on Amiga and FastTracker 2 on PC in 1990's to make music. Last thing i ever made were in 1998.
I made various genres. 50% were probably Rave and Techno.
@Ventilator Ahhhh Fast Tracker 2. I was a Scream Tracker 3 person myself, before heading over to Impulse Tracker. A lot of Rave was made here too, with a 100% ratio of Amen Beat sample being used in my tracks.
I actually downloaded a spiritual successor to Impulse Tracker a while back, called Schism Tracker. It was like I was looking at Egyptian hieroglyphs. I had absolutely NO idea what to do. It also didn't help that I couldn't find a single source of good samples like I did back in the '90s. Goodness did I love those sample CDs that were sold here. Wish I still had a few.
These days I upgraded to Reason 10, plus I found a good source of samples again too. Reason is much easier to work with, but sometimes I do miss the magic feeling of those Tracker programs.
Adobe illustrator... I'm not sure if this guy thought reporting a bunch of hours would make him seem super dedicated or what. I bet he literally researched programs. Drew stuff up in other things and threw it out during that time period as well.
It's like when you say you spent all night working on a paper but you threw out the first revision at 2am and started from scratch.
@Daniel36 Screamtracker 3. Cool. I heard of Impulse tracker too of course, but never used it.
It's easy to find samples today if you take it from other modules.
Amiga modules can be loaded straight into PC trackers too.
Amiga sites probably have over 100.000 tracks.
Skale Tracker on PC is a replica of FastTracker 2 and works in Windows 10. Newest version is old (0.81), but after fiddling with it, it looks like it's a complete tracker.
All things i remember using in FT 2 also worked in Skale.
Skale/FastTracker 2 is supports 16-Bit samples and up to 32 channels or something.
Newest Skale Tracker is from year 2005.. lol. At least there is a windows version of FT2.
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