Few things were as satisfying in the late '80s and early '90s as plugging the Sega Mega Drive and kicking some serious butt for hours, even if the game lasted only 20 minutes. The Mega Drive even had exclusivity over its direct sequel, but beyond the content itself, another aspect that fascinated us about those games was the graphics. Want to know how they made them? The official answer is pixel by pixel through the Digitizer System, which in its various versions combined optical pens, digitizing tablets, and the AutoCAD software.
Pixel Art and the Mega Drive
Pixel art is much more flexible than it appears, and no one can deny that it carries a certain charm, but it is no longer a priority among major video game developers. However, if we travel 30 years into the past, pixel art was the rule, not the exception.
For example, the Sega Mega Drive had only 64 kilobytes of video memory, could display only 64 colors at a time, and its resolution didn't go beyond 320 x 240 (PAL version) in progressive mode. In other words, Sega's designers had to squeeze these limited resources to the maximum. One of the most important weapons in their arsenal was known as the Digitizer System.
Inside the Digitizer System
If the artists had to make a background or a sprite, it most likely went through the Digitizer System. This system was connected to a NEC PC-98 computer with hard drives (something very expensive at the time), and it consisted of two dedicated CRT screens.
The original version of the Digitizer System came equipped with an optical pen, but once the Digitizer System III came into action, developers had access to AutoCAD software, and a series of digitizing tablets with a pointer (or puck) that allowed working at resolutions of 0.1 millimeters.
As expected, in the photos we can see piles of floppy disks, probably loaded with additional resources.
From Arcades to Home Console
The use of the Digitizer System was not exclusive to the Mega Drive; it all started with the arcade boards System 1 (with Pitfall II as an example) and System 16 (Fantasy Zone), the latter serving as the basis for the popular console.
The End of an Era
When did Sega stop using the Digitizer System? Unfortunately we don't know exactly, but it's not absurd to think it was 1997, the year the Mega Drive was officially discontinued.
