Wolverine to Discworld – Pixel Artist David Swan Shares His Journey

My name is David Swan, born in the small Scottish town of Ayr.

Back when I was a young child, there were no video games as we would recognise them today. So my first sight of a video game, the act of actually interacting with images on a television was something utterly new and mesmerising. I’d played Pong before, but when I saw Space Invaders and then Defender I started to spend time at the arcades playing games and watching their fast development.

My Commodore 64 replaced the arcade, Saturday was spent playing Elite. Then a SEGA Master System, my first console, 32 colours on the screen seemed a luxury compared to my humble C64.

A few years later I’d seen in a shop window a SNES playing the intro to Krusty’s Super Fun House and thought “It can’t get better than this”. So a SNES joined my Master System under the TV.

Now let’s jump forward to how i got myself into video games…

It started in a small dark rented room in a tenement building in a less than salubrious part of Glasgow. Between these dismal 4 walls, I tried with little success to become the graphic artist I’d always wanted to be. My days were spent printing photocopies of my art and sending them to agents and companies with the usual sympathetic “no” in response around a month later.

Influences came from what you could actually lay your hands on. There was no internet to show you the breadth of what existed, you had to find things yourself and share them with like minded friends. Comics, books and of course 2000 AD had always been a route into Sci-Fi fantasy for all British kids like me. I’d read Marvel comics, but 2000 AD’s glimpses into a dystopian future captured my imagination more than a guy in spandex flying across New York could, well maybe until Watchmen, that moved Superhero’s up a notch. Video games inspired me, but the idea of having any influence beyond playing hadn’t entered my mind.

Everything changed when in W.H. Smith, I bought a copy of CVG (Computer and Video Games) magazine and in the back was an advert for a position as a Pixel Artist at a games company called Teeny Weeny Games. That sliding door opened and just 2 weeks later I’m at a desk in London (the big smoke) with an Amiga 4000 sat in front of me. I’d never done any computer graphics, but I was thrown in at the deep end clicking pixel upon pixel to make my first sprite, Wolverine.

Teeny Weeny was owned by Angela Sutherland, an intelligent and feisty lady. She’d previously worked at Firebird and understood the business end of games. They’d just had a little hit with a Gameboy title called FireFighter and confidence was running high. A deal with Marvel to make the SEGA Mega Drive Wolverine game seemed like we were on the on the way to bigger and better things!

Wolverine: Adamantium Rage was meant to be a 2 meg (16 megabit) cart and that was more memory than we knew what to do with. That gave us room for large sprites with a lot of frames of animation for the time. Also a lot of great music, which even if the game isn’t appreciated, the music still is by games freaks worldwide. First game ever with regenerating energy, a moment of note in Video Game history!

This was my very first game and I didn’t consider anything other than doing a very basic sprite, I hadn’t considered trying to convey the character of Wolverine and If i had my time over i would do it very differently…

The next few years saw me working on the Discworld point and click adventure games. I personally did all the icons and some of the sprites. On the sequel Discworld II: Missing Presumed…!? there was a lot of frame colouring and fixing animations and backgrounds. For Discworld Noir I didn’t have much input, I just textured the main character, which was the only real-time model in the game.

I then worked on a myriad of conversions onto the SEGA Saturn from the original PlayStation console.

SEGA Manx TT was a huge project that took me all the way to Australia, included time working at SEGA in Tokyo and even a visit to the legendary team at AM2! I created every texture in the game and there’s a much longer story to tell about the quirks of working with Model 2 board textures, but that’s for another article.

A year or so after that high, we sadly had a low. Teeny Weeny Games (TWG) renamed Perfect Entertainment failed and I moved to IG, Intelligent Games. It too was destined to fail, but for the few years I was there I worked on EA’s Formula 1 Manager and 2 FIFA games. On one FIFA just modelling footballer’s haircuts… Oh the glamour :).

From its ashes I found myself at KUJU working on the 2 Battalion Wars games with Nintendo, designing characters, texturing and making all the weapons. It was high pressure work and after a short stint at their sister company Zoe Mode I was burnt out and the financial crash of 2008 meant I and many others found ourselves laid off. Unlike others I saw it as a gift, I went freelance but I drifted out of games by accident. If you’re not in an office, you fall out of people’s radar. In retrospect I can look back now and appreciate the creativity of those times with some longing and nostalgia.

Finally I have to mention some of the key video games that grabbed my attention during this time, games that still draw me back even now.

I still play Doom (1993), it was quite literally a game changer.

The graphics from Mega Man Legends made my jaw drop…

Changing the textures in the intros to suit a specific camera angle, so clever. I took it into the office and every artist said “Amazing”, every programmer said “whatever, there’s no effects”.

Killing Time on the 3DO, I loved the photographed enemies and the filmed exposition sequences laid over the real-time action. Sometimes I wonder if, in some alternate universe, games evolved with bigger more detailed sprite animations instead of moving to full 3D.

Panzar Dragoon Saga, Jet Set Radio, Assault Suit Valken, Alisia Dragoon, PaRappa the Rapper – all other games that for me stood out at different times, either because I loved to play them or the graphics seemed to me to add something to video games as a whole.

All in all I had some highs and lows, never worked on a massive seller, most of the projects I worked on got cancelled before release, but that’s how it goes for most workers, Just lucky I was there at a time where there was a palpable change every year in graphics and gameplay. Whenever I thought “It can’t get better than this” – It did!