Editor-in-Chief at GameDeveloper.com, Berklee College of Music game design lecturer, BJJ Purple Belt 🤼♀️, hobbyist game dev, beginner pixel artist, sometimes screenwriter, fitness dork, volunteer EMT. She/her.
I need to do the research on which school or which instructor (or whatever the motivating factor) was in the late 80s that lead to this art style being so prevalent in the early 90s. I wouldn't even know what to call it. Wacky Realism? Everything is rooted to a common basic perspective and ground plane, but almost nothing has a straight line, and everything looks like it's melting slightly. Every cartoon from 1991 to 1996 looked like this.
In DotT's case it was a pretty direct line of inspiration from Chuck Jones' (legendary Looney Tunes animator and background artist) - and his lesser known collaborator, Maurice Noble's - work from the 60s, eg Roadrunner's desert landscapes, What's Opera Doc, Duck Dodgers in the 24½th Century, etc. Jones got a special thanks in the DotT credits. But yeah, there was absolutely a nostalgia for that kind of stuff, cartoon Googie, 50s kitsch etc in the 1990s that was very obvious in the work of Spümcø and others. It was old enough to be "uncool" at that point which gave it a sort of hipster cachet, especially after a run through the "make it twisted and goofy" filter.
On Psychonauts 2 the term of art was "wonky", eg "I think we need to wonkify those trees by 20%", ie make them more off kilter, goofily angled, weird lookin'. But I think it reaches its purest expressions in 2D via stuff like cartoon animation and backgrounds.
Damn I wish Cohost had favorites on comments, this is an unexpectedly high quality response.
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