CaesarZX：
对于RTS游戏《横扫千军》的制作，Geoffrey Keighley的文章已经不足以全面讲述那段历史，而加入一个亲自参与此游戏制作的人物的视角，我们就可以看到一个更完整的横扫千军诞生史。 这篇连载作者是《横扫千军》美工总监Clayton Kauzlaric，他从去年9月开始在他自己的Blog上连载自己在Cavedog参与制作《横扫千军》 的经历。本连载由我与游戏编年史的主人无声畅游合作翻译推出。
点击这里进入连载目录
第五章：首则广告
无声畅游 译
欢迎来到战争的全新境界。
你们中一些老玩家也许会想起《横扫千军》的第一版平媒广告。我认为那个广告为Cavedog赢得了第一流的印象,或者是接近二流……也许是三流。但绝对不会低于第十六流, 我还是比较乐观向上的。
正如你所见，平面游戏广告总是遵循着千篇一律的模式。随便打开一本1997年以前的游戏杂志你都会发现那些广告都惊人得相似。他们差不多都是这样的(如下图)：
这些广告往往都是在游戏的美工部分还相对比较粗糙的时候造就的，所以它们总用一些徒有其表华而不实的艺术图片,或者一张巨大且夸夸其谈的照片来拼命炒作一个游戏。可游戏本身却做不到那些。一个只有12个像素的游戏角色是摆不上台面的。
问题是，游戏广告所展示的画面,总是比游戏实际效果要超前个10年，甚至在游戏实际画面变得是那么回事后也是如此。这在今天已经是屡见不鲜。我并不是责备广告代理机构这么搞。我从不怀疑他们有本事在一个下午就瞎搞出19个这样的东西，而且还有多余的时间吹牛B并玩一盘高尔夫。同样的，这样的搞法对任何平面广告都是适用的。既然那对推销润肤霜和汽车有效……那游戏为什么不呢？
为GT Interactive效劳的广告公司,在1997年初,就是这么干的!我们立刻对此表示反感。我们清楚游戏正式上市前,就只有这么一两幅平面广告,我们当然希望它们能产生最大的影响。Chris和我坚信:我们的游戏靠的是本身的品质。我们坚持要求广告做成一大张横跨两整版的游戏截图。
我们拥有一个巨大的优势。GT几年来一直占据着所有主流PC游戏杂志内封面折页的广告空间。以前,这样的黄金地段总是用来刊登上述那 些标准模式的大幅广告招贴,但我们却用它刊登了一两幅巨型截图展示广告。Chris, Ron和我先写下基本的宣传词,然后再由广告公司的家伙们装饰美化一番。我的工作是对整个广告进行大致的布局,以便能容下那幅巨大的截图。以下便是上面那幅连页广告截图的原料图片。
好吧, 这本来是原始图片,只不过Blogger让它有些失真了!
虽说几个月之后,TA就拥有了一个内建的抓图快键,使我们能毫不费力地抓取游戏快照——可惜当前我们还没有这项功能。我不得不制作一系列较小的截图,然后将它们置于已导入地图编辑器的原始.PCX文件上。我打开网格视图效果制作了第二张截图, 并在Photoshop中用显示蒙版功能将网格与地形的3D效果融合到一起。
这一方式带来了理想的效果。在这幅广告与TA<PC Gamer>上刊登的第一篇前瞻报道期间,我们还去了1997年的E3展,并带去了大量绝佳的宣传料。一些竞争对手的RTS游戏,也在一年内采用了与我们相同的平面广告。不过,就算在巨幅整版截图已普及的今天,你依然能看到大量遵循上述101守则的游戏广告充斥着无数杂志。
Part 5: The First Ad
Some of you old timers might remember the first print advertisement for Total Annihilation. I think that ad scored a first for Cavedog. Or a close second… maybe third. Definitely no more than sixteenth overall. I’m positive.
Y’see, print ads for games almost always followed a time-honored format. Crack open any game magazine From before 1997 and you will see that the advertisements are remarkably homogeneous. They all looked something like this:
This dates back to the time when game art was relatively crude, so some sort of swanky art or a big juicy photograph would be used to build an image for a game. The game itself usually couldn’t do that. A character with only twelve pixels just doesn’t have a lot of presence.
The thing is, game ads still looked like that decades later, even after in-game art started to look reasonably slick. It’s a common design even today. I don’t blame ad agencies for doing this. I’m sure they can crap out nineteen of these in a single afternoon and still have time for some blow and a round of golf. And to be fair, it’s a pretty common approach to any print ad. It works for selling lotion and cars… Why not games?
That is exactly the sort of ad the marketing firm working for GT Interactive showed us when they came by in early 1997. We hated it immediately. We knew the game would have only one or two print ads before it launched and we wanted them to have maximum impact. Chris and I were adamant that we sell the game with the game. We insisted that the ad feature a full two-page screenshot.
I don’t recall seeing this before. It’s not like we thought it up. It was just a matter of time before giant screenshots became commonplace, but Total Annihilation was certainly one of the first games to do it. There was some resistance From the agency. The concern was that (gasp!) the pixels would be visible since a computer game couldn’t match the print resolution of a magazine. That sounded fine to us. It would absolutely show gamers what they were getting.
We did have one advantage. GT Interactive owned the fold-out ad space inside the cover of all the major PC gaming magazines for a couple years running. This prime real estate was mostly used for big versions of the standard formula above, but we would get that spot for one or two display ads before the game hit store shelves. Chris, Ron and I wrote the basic copy which the ad folks polished up a bit. I did a rough layout then went to work creating a big, big screenshot. Here is the original image:
Okay. This was the original image, but Blogger crunched it down quite a bit.
A few months later, Total Annihilation would later have a built-in screen shot key command. We could take snapshots like this with no problem – but we didn’t have that feature at this point. I had to take a series of smaller shots and drop them onto the original .PCX file we imported into our map editor. I took a second shot with the mesh view enabled and did a small mask reveal in Photoshop to communicate the 3D-ness of the terrain.
It had the desired result. Between this ad and our first preview coverage in PC Gamer, we went to E3 in 1997 with lots of good buzz around Total Annihilation. Several competing RTS games had print ads almost identical to this (including the landscape mesh) within a year. Giant full page screenshots are pretty commonplace now, but you still see plenty of that Game Ad 101 ethic between the pages of magazines to this day.
