With the release of RPG Maker XP, the graphical capabilities of the engine expanded, and the big, detailed sprites of Ragnarok were considered the pinnacle of RPG Maker art. Websites like The Spriters Resource and Sprite Database helped you to acquire materials, but when you found an obscure Japanese game with nice graphics you wanted to use, there was only one possible solution: you’d download the ROM, open it with an emulator and learn to use the tools the emulator gave you, like toggling layers on and off to isolate a character or a background. Stealing art from other games may sound like the lazy route, but ripping was hard work, in its own way. Art was often stolen without permission or credit. Without a way to encrypt games, users were quick to cannibalize every new scrap of original content. However, few people were willing to make and distribute completely original resources. Art and music assets were ripped, edited, combined. Soon, libraries like the charas-project were born to share graphical assets. SNES games were especially treasured, because the console’s limitations were similar to those of RPG Maker 2000: small sprites, 256 colours, a restricted number of animated frames. Ripping from commercial titles soon became an integral part of the early RPG Maker days. GameMaker users were ripping as well, and some famous GameMaker games from that era, like Ark 22, feature a number of ripped and edited graphics. Ripping assets was not a new concept to the pre-pubescent indie scene. That’s why they - we - turned to stealing art from other games. But all games need art assets to shine, and most of those teens had never used graphics software more complicated than MS Paint. RPG Maker is an intuitive tool, and people were quick to master it even without official support. Teens with no preparation, no guidance, and no bloody idea of what they were doing. The community thrived in the shadows, a bunch of teenagers armed with cracked, unofficially-translated copies of the engine, and one shared dream: making games as cool as Final Fantasy. I saw all this because, when I was a teenager, I illegally ripped art assets from commercial games.īefore 2005, the amateur game-making tool RPG Maker didn’t have an official publisher. They are games I’ve always appreciated in a disjointed state, their plants and furniture dissected and laid out on sprite sheets like tiny organs on an autopsy table. I've never played the first Star Ocean, the Suikoden series, Terranigma, or Chrono Trigger. I saw them in countless other games, their lush branches decorating the corners of fantasy worlds filled with magic, dragons, and bugs. I never played Secret of Mana 2 on the Super Nintendo, but I could recognize its trees in a blink.
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January 2023
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