Behind The Scenes: Comix Zone

Comix Zone’s story begins with Peter Morawiec, an Eastern European artist who was hired to work at the Sega Technical Institute (STI) in America in 1991. The new studio had been set up as a joint project between Sega of America and Japan’s Sonic Team in order for the Japanese talent to tutor up-and-coming Western developers. Morawiec’s first task within the studio was to create the art for the highly impressive special stages in Sonic The Hedgehog 2, but by the following year he had graduated to the position of game designer on Sonic Spinball.

During the development of Spinball, Morawiec put together a design for a completely original Mega Drive project, which, according to STI manager Roger Hector, was one of the best design pitches the company had ever seen. “Peter came to me one day and wanted to show me a video he had made,” recalls Hector. “It was an animation that he had created to illustrate a game concept where the player must solve each frame of a literal comic book, page by page. It was a breathtaking job he had done all by himself. He’d captured the entire essence of an original idea and illustrated it beautifully while being highly animated and set to music. It was fantastic. Easily the best presentation of a game concept I had ever seen. There was no doubt, after viewing it, that this was a game that STI had to make.”

Morawiec explains the processes that led to his concept video. “Growing up in Eastern Europe I very much loved whatever Western comics filtered through – Asterix & Obelix, The Smurfs and so on. but it wasn’t until I came to the US that I discovered all the comics and graphic novels catering to teens and beyond. Much of this was thanks to my Sega co-workers who were ardent comic book fans. The idea to make a comic book-themed game occurred to me while perusing the aisles of a Palo Alto comic book shop with those Sega buddies on a lunch break. I figured that by merging these two popular mediums we could create something very cool and unique. I then created an animated demo on my Amiga and pitched it to management. They gave it the thumbs up but it wasn’t until after Sonic Spinball that we had an official go-ahead.”

The original concept video for Comix Zone, as well as the hand-drawn level designs, reveals that the final game differed little from the initial idea. Almost everything from those original designs is present in the game and works terrifically, making for one of the most fun and original beat-’em-ups on the Mega Drive. For those who haven’t actually played Comix Zone, allow us to explain its genius. The player takes control of Sketch Turner, an artist who has been transported into the pages of his own comic book by the super-villain he created. Within the physical confines of the comic itself Sketch must physically move through each panel and every page, fighting off his own creations and solving special puzzles as he goes. As well as demonstrating a fairly solid fighting system, Comix Zone really stood out for its inventive level design. Sketch could move through the comic’s panels in a variety of ways, by leaping between the borders of each image, ripping through them or by dropping down to the one underneath, which added a non-linear element and a little replayability to the game. It was so well done that the player really felt as though they were trapped inside a comic book and literally fighting their way through each page. An extra layer of depth was also added by being able to rip parts of the pages. Sketch was able to tear a piece of the page from the background and fold it into a paper plane to be thrown at the enemies while his pet rat, Roadkill, could sniff out and uncover hidden power-ups from behind pages.

Roadkill could also be used to solve some puzzles as his small size allowed him to enter hard-to-reach areas and activate switches. For most Comix Zone players he became an essential part of the gameplay and a much-loved feature in the game. For such an important element, however, nobody seems to know exactly who can be credited with coming up with the idea. “To be honest, I don’t remember exactly,” says Morawiec. “We were a closely knit core team and we would oftentimes brainstorm together. Sidekick characters were pretty much a must back then, but I was looking for a sidekick who wouldn’t get in the way of the main character. I think either Howard Drossin (the composer) or I came up with the rat idea, it fit those requirements nicely and made for a fitting pet for Sketch, who was a tough grunge-rocker type of guy.” Regardless of who invented Roadkill however, his inclusion was just one of many small touches that built up to make Comix Zone such a fun and unique game to play, as well as a testament to the masterminds behind its design.

If Comix Zone is a triumph of game design, then, it equally represents a masterclass in programming. The coder at the helm of Comix Zone was Adrian Stephens, an STI newcomer who became good friends with Morawiec and even went on to found an independent studio with him in 1996. “I had been recruited by STI to work on Saturn games because of my 3D experience,” explains Stephens. “But when the Saturn was delayed, I needed to find another project to work on in the meantime, and Peter Morawiec had a great idea for a Genesis game that sounded like an interesting challenge. I performed all the programming of the game and tools and was also the director of the technology involved. Getting the game to fit in 2MB, and dynamically decompressing and paging in and out graphical elements while the game was running was a big challenge. We needed to be able to scroll across a large page of graphics that not only wouldn’t fit in the VRAM all at once, but actually wouldn’t all fit in RAM either, so a lot of the processing power was devoted to frantically decompressing data in the background. If you try to compress a bunch of Genesis ROM images you’ll find Comix Zone will shrink the least. That’s testament to how compressed everything in it is already. We really managed to pack a lot into that 2MB. I was also quite pleased with the speech bubbles. Consoles like the Genesis were not really designed with things like proportional fonts and dynamically generated graphics in mind, but we got it to work.”

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