Early Gaming Animation - Duck Hunt

It is interesting to see how far animation has come from the early stages of "Flipbook" style animation to modern computer software that can animate and render entire new worlds in a few hours.  I have looked at early animation earlier in this blog like "Steamboat Willie", and then I looked at modern gaming animation with "Wolfenstein".  But this post I chose to look back at early gaming with "Duck Hunt".  This game was part of the first era of realistic gaming, because the controller was a gun that you could use to point at the ducks flying in the game.  You were able to actually shoot at the screen and kill the ducks - all virtually.  It was an interesting development in technology, as well as animation, because the game creators had to animate their game to mimic real life (such as feathers flying off of the duck when it is hit, and the duck falling out of the sky).  The animators had to create several options of animations for every action that could possibly happen in the game.  I think the result was a fun, realistic game that was ground-breaking for the time.

Wolfenstein - Animation in Games

This week I chose to talk about animation in video games.  These days video games are having more and more "cut scenes" where the player has little to no control over the character's actions and just watches a scene unfold.  These scenes are powered by animation and in most cases are much more realistic than the actual gameplay.  In the video below, you can see both cinematic cut scenes and gameplay, which shows the difference in animation style and visual impact.  *WARNING* the video is extremely graphic, showing gruesome, violent scenes.

I think the animation here is highly sophisticated, using different camera angles and lighting techniques that make the characters come to life.  For contrast, I'm putting the original Wolfenstein game below - Wolfenstein 3D.