Silicon Graphics
Back in the mid-’90s, 3D graphics weren’t that common yet, but Nintendo and Rare were already thinking ahead. They were looking for state of the art visuals, and to achieve this, they turned to the best hardware of the time: Silicon Graphics (SGI) workstations. Rare made heavy use of these machines to create the look for Donkey Kong Country on the Super Nintendo. Characters and environments were modeled on these workstations in full 3D. Then, they were rendered and converted into 2D sprites for the actual game. This resulted in amazing graphics nobody had seen before. I remember getting Donkey Kong Country for my birthday in ’95 and it blew my mind into orbit.
The first time I saw Donkey Kong Country was on one of those Super Nintendo ‘demo units’. Even my father was impressed. We had a few of those units in stores across town. All the kids desperately grouped up in front of one to check out the latest games. The Super Nintendo was visible inside a round plastic casing, connected to a small TV above it. The controllers stuck out from the front of the unit, coiled by security cables. This was all just one big unit. I had to look past the shoulders of larger kids to catch a glimpse of the cartridge. It was almost like a holy relic. Every time my mother took me to town she dropped me off at one of those demo pods. Undoubtedly, she was fine with not babysitting me for a while so she could go about her business. And that was fine by me as well, because I could spend hours in front of these demo units. In fact, I used to look forward to my mother dumping me in front of one. It was mutually beneficial. But anyway, Donkey Kong Country had great graphics for its time, trust me. And this was all thanks to Silicon Graphics.
Rare made a lot of SGI image renders for the promotion of their games. Eventually, Nintendo then used SGI’s extensively for promotional material for their Nintendo 64. Back then, still known as the Ultra 64. You’d see this futuristic imagery all over the place. In magazines, posters, and those glorious instruction manuals games used to come with. I miss those manuals. I would constantly flip through my NES and SNES manuals, just to look at all the artwork. I used to redraw a lot of those images. The art of Super Mario World, Goof Troop and Mickey Mania spring to mind (I could never get that rope right.) Years later, with the N64 manuals, we got those slick, shiny 3D characters on every page. Not as much fun to draw (too difficult) but highly entertaining to look at either way. Seeing SGI Mario getting burnt by SGI Bowser in Super Mario 64’s thick manual was amazing. Manuals were awesome. It made games feel like a more complete package.
The rest of this article is to show off promotional (and manual) artwork rendered with SGI workstations. They’re all from the mid-’90’s to early 2000’s. They definitely used to hype me up as a kid, browsing through the latest issues of Nintendo Official Magazine and N64 Magazine.
Promotional Art
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