Philips Magnavox Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution Trigger Happy - Manual (Page 243)

Trigger Happy
245
anime (animated cartoon films)—the massive Japanese
toy and videogame corporation Bandai, for instance, is
a major sponsor of animated programming. Whole
books have been written about “Japanimation” alone.
But the most pertinent aspect of these comic forms for
our purposes is their peculiar style of character
drawing, which has a very strong influence on Japanese
videogames. Anime in particular makes use of a bizarre,
so-called deformed style for its people: they have huge
heads and eyes, and tiny torsos.
In the early days of videogames, technological
considerations more or less forced designers into
exactly the same style. The most influential early game
to feature a fully humanoid, animated “character” was
Shigeru Miyamoto’s Donkey Kong, with its
eradefining mustachioed hero, later to be christened
Mario. Because of the low resolution offered by
videogame systems back then, character designers
only had a limited amount of pixels—the little squares
of light that make up the visual image—to play with.
Miyamoto gave Jumpman (as he was then) a hat,
simply because the technology couldn’t enable
animated hair; he wore dungarees just to differentiate
his red arms from his blue body and legs. As