As 90s and 00s nostalgia hits culture and media harder than ever in recent years, many indie developers have turned to creating games inspired by their childhood – and they are devoted to making the experience as authentic as they can. This includes the odd bugs and imperfections representative of games developed on past-generation hardware. However, what do industry veterans, who have spent most of their careers wrestling with technical limitations, think about the recent popularity of PS1 and low-poly inspired games?
Square Enix programmer Koji Sugimoto, who worked on Final Fantasy X, Xenogears and Threads of Fate among other titles, commented on the topic in a recent X post. In response to an official post by Unity Japan showcasing a new feature that allows devs to easily replicate the texture warping and slightly distorted feel of low-poly graphics, Sugimoto said, “Back in the day, we used to put in painstaking work and made many futile efforts to avoid texture warping, only for it to be called ‘charming’ nowadays.”
While many gamers nowadays think dearly of the slightly distorted look of PS1 games, it is understandable why veteran programmers like Sugimoto might be baffled by the phenomenon. Back in the day, dealing with warped textures was not an easy task, and developers did their utmost to make them look as realistic as possible. But why was the issue so difficult to manage, especially for consoles like PS1?
The “texture warping issue” in question was actually a result of the limitations of the PlayStation, which didn’t have a built-in Z-buffer (depth buffer) and had to rely on affine texture mapping. So, what does this exactly entail? For reference, modern GPUs are built for 3D rendering, so they automatically determine which objects are closer and which are farther from the camera – thus regulating how those objects overlap, making sure which surfaces should be in front of others. r. However, PlayStation’s GPU couldn’t do that – the lack of a depth buffer meant that the hardware itself had no way to determine how the 3D objects and polygons were positioned in relation to each other (without it, surfaces farther from the camera would cover objects closer to the camera, compromising the illusion of a realistic 3D space).
Software developers had to work their way around this issue by manually sorting polygon information in the right order so that realistic portrayal of perspective is maintained. Furthermore, because of the hardware’s inability to process depth (Z coordinates), developers relied on affine texture mapping – a way of projecting textures on objects that doesn’t rely on depth and only uses X and Y coordinates. However, this brought another problem for the game developers. Since affine texture mapping didn’t account for the perspective, it ended up making the objects warped and inaccurate when viewed from different angles. Additionally, there was also a problem of pixels jittering and wobbling due to the hardware’s lack of ability to accurately distribute them on the screen.
This caused a lot of trouble for PS1 developers, who had to go through the tedious work of hiding the distortions and polishing the wobbliness as best as they could. Sugimoto reminisces on this in one of his earlier posts. “It’s detestable,” he commented on the warping issue he struggled with during his days developing games for the PS1. “I spent so many work hours in vain trying to work my way around [warped textures]. I just don’t get what’s so interesting about trying to replicate that.”
What once caused headaches to PS1 programmers is now thought of as an appealing feature that marked the era – and many developers nowadays are trying to work their way backwards to achieve its rugged, nostalgic look using modern hardware. It’s not just the devs though, as demand for nostalgia games among players is just as high. This probably makes people like Sugimoto a minority, but it’s not hard to relate to their frustration either, as they are basically seeing the unintentional “flaws” they failed to iron out celebrated as “signature” characteristics of the games they created.
