A veteran Final Fantasy programmer hates how indie games deliberately recreate PS1 visual bugs he made 'many futile efforts' to fix: 'I just don’t get what’s so interesting about trying to replicate that'

First reported by Automaton, veteran programmer Koji Sugimoto (Chrono Trigger, Xenogears, Final Fantasy 10) criticized modern games' emulation of retro visual glitches, specifically the affine texture warping of the original PlayStation, a frequent feature of lo-fi, throwback indie games.

On August 5, Sugimoto responded to a tweet from Unity Japan about a new tool in the engine to let devs more easily emulate the PS1's texture warping effect, a limitation of the hardware that meant flat textures would warp and jitter when viewed from anything other than a direct perpendicular angle.

"Back in the day, we used to put in painstaking work and made many futile efforts to avoid texture warping," said Sugimoto, "only for it to be called 'charming' nowadays." I have defaulted to Automaton's translation rather than the machine translation provided by Twitter.

Sugimoto also linked to a far harsher critique of deliberate texture warping he made all the way back in 2019. "It's detestable," Sugimoto said (auto translation opted for "object of disdain"), "I spent so many work hours in vain trying to work my way around [warped textures]. I just don't get what's so interesting about trying to replicate that."

I understand Sugimoto's frustration, given his own work trying to fix the problem, and could take or leave texture warping myself as far as nostalgic flourishes go, but overall I do love when games look like garbage, and I'm only half-kidding. I think Thief: The Dark Project is still one of the best looking games ever made, and all of its NPCs were made with like, three triangles.

The great Brian Eno has an often-shared passage from his book, A Year With Swollen Appendices, that does a far better job of explaining and defending the artificial recreation of imperfections like texture warping better than I ever could. “Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature," Eno wrote. "CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit⁠—all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided."

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