Tracing the past, present, and future of game cinematics
Anton Sderhll
Tuesday 25th January 2022
Video game graphics have come a long way from the 2D 8-bit animations we saw back in the early 1980s. The last few decades have seen major strides -- not only for video games, but also the cinematics that power these virtual worlds. Whether we're talking about in-game cutscenes or the movie quality game trailers that accompany them, there's no denying that video game cinematics have come far since their first iterations.
Yet cinematics have not only developed in terms of graphical fidelity. The evolution from pixels to photorealism has accompanied a change in the styles and formats that games are now able to explore. Cinematics have always been used to set the tone of a game, but the possibilities they provide for a game's feel are now near-endless, with further potential opening up in the future of gaming. From the 48-minute trailer for CD Projekt Red's Cyberpunk 2077 to the innovative narrative impact of Naughty Dog's The Last of Us cutscenes, cinematics both draw in an audience and keep them hooked on gameplay. But how exactly did cinematics evolve into the artistic productions we see today -- and what could the future hold for their use in gaming?
Anton Söderhäll, Goodbye Kansas
Early game graphics were rudimentary, but functional and accessible: simple pixels on a screen could bring you on a journey to shoot bullets in space, to speed down a racing track, or simply to hit a ping-pong ball back and forth. The cultural relevance of characters from early arcade or platform games -- such as Pac-Man or Super Mario -- demonstrates their continued accessibility throughout several decades of game evolution. While graphical output in these first arcade and platform games provided the
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