Ancient Artifacts of the Origin Museum, Part I

For the next couple of weeks I’ll be posting a three-part series of articles based on several conversations I’ve had with Mr. Joe Garrity, curator of the The Origin Museum. You might remember Joe as the mastermind behind the scenes of a massive video game archival operation that took place earlier this summer at Mythic Studios, where 1 Terabyte of artifacts, source code, artwork, FMV, and design documents were salvaged from Electronic Arts’ archives of the defunct Origin Systems Inc. In this series of articles Joe tells us some of the stories behind artifacts recovered from Origin Systems (the creators of the Ultima and Wing Commander series). In our first part of the series, Joe reveals some (until now) unseen artwork by Dan Bourbonnais - an artist that worked during Origin’s “Age of Enlightenment”, and shows us some of the painstaking artistic work that goes into game production.

From stunning concept painting…

…to final digital 16-color artwork… (Chsheket, an important NPC in Ultima: Worlds of Adventure 2: Martian Dreams.)

First off, Dan Bourbonnais was a staff artist for Origin in it’s hey-day (1988 to 1992)–He did artwork for many famous (and infamous) Origin games, including Wing Commander, Ultima VI, Savage Empire, and Martian Dreams.  I’ve always been interested in how artwork was integrated into the older games, before digital tablets, and 3D modeling software–you know, old-school.

I have what I call my ‘Grail Diary’ of Origin Museum info–a little leather book of notes, contact info, ideas, thoughts, etc.  I also keep a ‘wish list’ of Origin people that I admire, or want to communicate with someday.

Once in a while I’ll go back to that list, and try and look up some info on the names.  I was doing searches on Dan Bourbonnais’ email address, and I stumbled across his phone number.  ‘Cold-calling’ people is always a pretty risky thing to do–if handled wrong, it can close doors, rather than open them!  This was one of those few times that I thought ‘what the heck’, and just dialed.

Usually in these situations, all I expect is a hello, an email address, and a 5 minute conversation.  Dan was a wonderful guy, and seemed genuinely appreciative that I had called.  He spent over 30 minutes with me, answering all of my questions on his career, and telling a story or two on the old days.  Although Dan is out of the gaming business (working for a big-name architectural firm in Indiana), he still looks fondly back on the times when his art was used for gaming worlds.

As I was thanking him for taking my call, he said, “Wait–I still have some old stuff from back in the Origin days.  If you give me your address, I’ll send them to you.  It’s not much, but there are some disks that might still have data on them.”  I was very appreciative, and thanked him immensely.

When the package arrived, I was awestruck—There were 2 boxes of 5.25″ disks, but all of them were in bad shape (don’t worry-I’m working on recovering the data).  There was an original artwork of a familiar character from Martian Dreams (one of the robots) that Dan apparently used as part of his resume.  He also included an Origin folder (see above) that he designed, and in it were 2 unusual art pieces—animation-type celluloids of spaceship interiors that looked very familiar.  It took my brain a couple of minutes to register—these were backgrounds from Kilrathi ships, used in the opening animatics from Wing Commander II!  The most interesting aspect of these cels is that back in the early 90s, artists apparently still used traditional techniques in developing game art, instead of today’s rendering software.  They would then take these artworks and scan them into digital files, to be used in the game.  One of the cels is multi-layered, which could just be a method of correcting a mistake, or adding details to the image.  After shooting off some pics to the Wing Commander news guys, they provided me with screenshots of the game that show the artwork.

From original cel painting…	From original cel painting…
… to digitized 256-color artwork used in the Wing Commander II Demo…	… to digitized 256-color artwork used in the Wing Commander II Demo…
… to final digital artwork used in Wing Commander II.	… to final digital artwork used in Wing Commander II.

Note: Wing Commander II images courtesy of WCNews.com

These artifacts are a very significant piece of history in videogames, because they show the transition between the standard techniques and today’s modern graphic development.  The fact that they are from the intro to a popular game gives them a connection to game enthusiasts, and adds to the ‘wow’ factor.

- Joe Garrity
Curator, The Origin Museum.

Editor’s note: Joe, thank you very much for giving us this glimpse into ‘the story behind the painting’ and these wonderful pieces of artwork. If you’d like to see how this artwork inspired the artwork in the final release of Wing Commander II, watch the full introduction sequence below: