Retronauts - 715: Episode 715 Preview: Sega Game Tapes / 3D: Faking It 'Til You Make It

Episode Date: September 12, 2025

Live from Long Island: Jeremy Parish, Diamond Feit, Stuart Gipp, and Kevin Bunch explore the delights of Sega's official VHS tapes from the ’80s and the myriad ways developers faked 3D in the pre-polygon days. Video versions at patreon.com/retronauts! Retronauts is made possible by listener support through Patreon! Support the show to enjoy ad-free early access, better audio quality, and great exclusive content. Learn more at http://www.patreon.com/retronauts 

This episode of Retronauts was recorded live at Long Island Retro Gaming Expo. These presentations originally had a considerable video component to them, and this is an audio podcast. But the good news is that if you'd like to enjoy the full audiovisual experience, you can go to patreon.com slash Retronauts and look for the tag L-I-R-G-E-L-I-R-G-E-Live. There you'll find not only this episode, but also the video component, filmed live at the event. This is a small service that we can provide for you, the loyal, faithful, retronauts listener. Thanks for your support. So welcome. I just got off an airplane. Actually, I think most of us just thought off of traveling. So if we seem a little loopy, that's why. But that's okay, because this is one where we're mostly going to let the pictures do the talking. This is called the wild world of Japanese game tapes Sega edition. Were any of you here, or not here, but in Milwaukee for Midwest Gaming Classic this year? Oh, one of you. Did you see us? Yes, that's the, okay, so there's one man who knows what?

this is all about. However, this is not the same presentation that we gave in Milwaukee. This is a new presentation, but the premise is game tapes. Stewart, what are game tapes? According to the UK. All games. Right. In all formats, no matter what, CD, DVD, Blu-ray, it's a game tape. Right. But that is not correct. The Japanese, only the Japanese had it right. They created videotapes of video games. And in the 1980s, early 90s, but mostly the late 80s, when the economy over in Japan was just booming, it was surging, they just had yen to throw everywhere on anything they wanted to.

It was still a lot to ask to buy an arcade machine, especially in the, you know, they live in very small houses in places like Tokyo. It's a very, very dense place with very small square footage. So instead, they would throw their money at having the next best thing, which was not video games because if you played, let's take a master system version or the NES version of Afterburner, you know that that is not the arcade perfect experience. So instead, they would create something called simulation tapes. And there were lots of different companies that kind of got in on this business. And I stumbled across some of these a few years ago and said, oh, that's neat. I'm making a video about the game Outrun. And so I put together,

or I didn't put together, I bought a videotape of Outrun and ripped it to Digital from VHS. And as you can see, the VHS tape that I had was very, very poor. Truly terrible, just an eye-searing atrocity. Oh, I'm sorry the music's not coming through. It's just the HDMI video. Let me see if I can crank this up for you. Okay, that might be a little too crank. Oh, yeah, we could put the mic by it, I guess.

One of them. We have four mics for a reason. Okay, can you guys hear that okay? Through the mic? All right. We can't have Outrun about the Outrun music. And so anyway, I thought, oh, that's neat. They made a couple of these.

There's Fantasy Zone. There's Outrun. There's Afterburner. It's cool that they did this. And so I started looking for more and discovered that there were actually hundreds and hundreds of video tapes available to purchase from Japan based on old, old video games. So I have not bought all of them, but I did kind of start a little project where I would just take these and rip them to digital and put them on YouTube, share them with video patrons and that sort of thing.

And, you know, after about a month or so of trying to get my VHS deck to work correctly, I realized that's not going to work so well. So I replaced it and got a better one where the colors are more accurate, if less, uh, exciting. So what I'm doing today and what these gentlemen are here to help me do today is to share some of these videotapes with you and just enjoy the site of super scalar graphics on an iMac screen. And that's either a great idea or a terrible idea. If it makes anyone sick, please direct your illness in a different direction than up here. Thank you. So, anyway, Outrun, you guys love Outrun, right? Yeah. We think you're going to elaborate and expound, yes. I do like Outrun. I think it's good.

I'm done. My son makes me play Outrun for him all the time because he likes watching the car drive around. So this is actually kind of a preview of the full retro-ounce presentation we're going to be getting in a few days. But Outrun was one of the earliest. games to come out with what Sega unofficially called super scalar technology, which was to create simulated 3D. And that was just far too demanding to recreate at home. And so if you couldn't

go to arcades, what you could do is you could have the Outrun experience at home by watching this video tape. And these tapes are great because in addition to like showing you every route for say Outrun, they also show bloopers, like what happens if your car gets wrecked. What are the different endings, things like that. And there's a lot of love that was put into these. The companies behind these were Sony, who you've probably heard of, and also a company called Citron and Art, who you may not have heard of, but they did publish a few Famicom games.

If you ever heard of the game, Otoki, which was an early music game, but also a shooter. Kind of hard to describe, but they were the company that published that. So they were the sort of art house publisher that was in the multimedia, basically, and the video games. And so, you know, these people all got together and said, let's make a business out of selling game tapes. So, really, I'm just here to show you videotape, footage, and if you, you know, if we feel like saying anything about the games, we'll do that. But really, I just kind of want everyone to enjoy some prime. 1980s VH best cassette masterworks from Japan. Thunderblade was another one from the Super Scalar line.

This is interesting because Thunderblade has never actually received a good home port, unlike Outrun. Has there ever been a good Thunderblade port? I honestly can't think of one night. The Master System version is terrible. Super Thunderblade for Genesis was a launch game. was a launch game programmed by

tech genius Eugeneaka and he still couldn't create a satisfactory version of Super Thunderblade Thunderblade

did ever even get like a Sega Ages I don't think so I don't believe it did I feel like this is one that they really

put a lot of stock into back in the 80s especially Sega of America and then in the modern era they've just kind of said you know, let's not.

And maybe this is one of those sensitivity things, because if you are familiar with your military action adventure movies of the early and mid-80s, you might recognize that blue helicopter, with the name Thunder in its title, seeming a little bit familiar, a little bit suspicious. And this was actually one of many games that attempted to take the film Blue Thunder,

which was a pretty big cinematic hit and even had a TV series, and turn it into a video game without actually paying for the license for the property. So, you know, back in the 80s, that was kind of the way things were. People were pretty fast and loose about using properties that belong to other people,

which is why, you know, Joe Musashi fought Godzilla and Spider-Man, and almost fought Mario. That was actually a bridge too far at the time. And now when, you know, they revisit those games, they're a little more circumspect and they're like, yeah, Godzilla, we don't know what you're talking about. Please use the 1.1 wrong,

not the version 1.0 wrong. Any other thoughts on Thunderblade, Super Thunderblade, Blue Thunder? You know, they're very pretty. I'll give them that. I mean, who doesn't love a super-scaler game? Are we, is everyone kind of familiar with how super-scaler technology works, essentially? If someone says no, I'll launch into a soliloquy, so please feel free to know.

No, I have no idea. Oh, no, no. Please tell us at length. That's what I'm here for. That's why they flew me in. Actually, do you really not? No, I don't really know. Honestly, okay.

So the idea behind, I don't know, Kevin, do you want to talk to stuff I've been jabbering? I can hop in here and correct me when I inevitably get the, things off because I don't talk about Super Scalar that much, but it's basically, they are faking 3D by using sprites, and then they're just sort of, what are they, overlaying the different sizes of the sprite? Like, it's not the same sprite necessarily. They just drew it at different distances, and it keeps getting closer, and they use, like, what, multiple processors just to move all of this stuff around at once. Well, the thing about Super Scalar is that it is the same sprite. Oh, it is?

So most technology does not have the ability, you know, of the 80s did not have the ability to take an object and zoom it. I mean, that was a big deal when the Super NES launched, was that the Super NES had the ability to stretch and contract and spin and warp and distort certain visual elements at a hardware level, which just did not happen at home consoles at the time. And so if you wanted to fake a 3D effect, you would draw like a little tiny sprite and then a bigger sprite and then a bigger sprite and then a hardware level. bigger sprite and then a big, even bigger sprite, and as something became closer to you, you would replace a little tiny sprite with a bigger sprite and go through that sequence. But the super scalar technology was great because it didn't have to do that. It could create the impression of motion of 3D by taking an individual sprite and just

making it very tiny and then stretching that all the way up. So instead of having that kind of stop-start effect where it's like one, two, three, four stages of size, it just smoothly moves through all of these different sizes. And then they have the ability not to just do that to a single sprite or to a few sprites, but to make everything in the world out of those sprites objects. So you have basically hundreds of, sorry. I, you know, I, that zoomed into my pretty much too quick. We'll do it.

Sprites, man, they're so exciting.