Aardman Digital’s Creative Director Dan Efergan said that "somewhere in our future is a stop motion video game”. The world-famous animation studio has recently branched out into the video game industry with their First World War narrative adventure 11-11: Memories Retold¸ set to release later this year. 11-11 uses graphics designed to emulate moving paintings to embody its poignant wartime setting.
Aardman Studios is to the stop motion industry what Pixar is to computer animation, leading to discussion on whether the studio has any plans to bring its distinctive look and feel to any subsequent games. This is especially evident following Pixar titles like Toy Story being replicated in the upcoming Kingdom Hearts 3.
The expertise, artistry and unique charm of Aardman Studios might be enough to cause a new interest in a game.
Video games animated through stop motion are not new by any means. Digitised sprites were commonplace during the 16-bit era, with many games utilising photography to create what passed for ‘realistic’ graphics in the early 90s.
Sometimes these were used for movie tie-in games, such as Batman Forever and Street Fighter: The Movie, where frames of the actors (or their stunt doubles) performing the moves would be used as the basis for character sprites. And indeed, many games sought to deliberately invoke the ‘claymation’ feel by using photos of clay figures as the source for the sprites, such as Street Fighter parody ClayFighter.
Digitised sprites have naturally fallen out of mainstream use, only now found in certain indie games, but perhaps the expertise, artistry and unique charm of Aardman Studios might be enough to cause a new interest in a game which makes use of digitised sprites, should 11-11 prove to be successful for the studio.
