My first attempts to animate a character on the Apple II were so bad, it was clear that no amount of tweaking would get me to the quality I wanted. I needed a real animator, and I didn’t have one. So I used a trick the early Disney animators had done with Snow White: I filmed live-action footage of actors doing the movements I needed for the game, and then I rotoscoped it.
This meant tracing the outline of the character on each frame of film, and mapping it somehow to the screen, pixel by pixel. For Karateka in 1982, I shot on Super-8, loaded the film into a Movieola and traced the frames on tracing paper. The next step was to somehow get the tracings into the computer. For this I used a gadget called a VersaWriter, which was basically two potentiometers hooked together to make a pantograph that plugged into the Apple’s game paddle port. It worked pretty well.
By the time I started my next game, Prince of Persia (in 1985), home video had been invented, so I was able shoot my 16-year-old brother David running and jumping on VHS tape. Of course the Apple II had no video input, so I still had to jerry-rig a process to get the frames into the computer so I could rotoscope them. I set up a 35mm still camera on a tripod, took pictures of each freeze-frame on the TV screen, and got the roll developed at Fotomat. That gave me a starting point to trace the 3x5 prints. It was a laborious process. To get the first simple cycle of eight frames of a character running, it took weeks of setup and tool-building, followed by days of work. Each frame had to be captured and cleaned up by hand, pixel by pixel.
But the result was worth it. The moment I finally saw the character running across the screen, I got chills. As rough and pixel-y as it was, I recognized my brother's way of running, his physical personality. It was the illusion of life.
