The art-style in Streets of Rage 4 looks to remain true to the original games but also gets updated for a more modern crowd.
It's a tough thing recreating a classic like Streets of Rage 4, especially when it's been almost a quarter of a century since the first game came out. Back then, everything was all 16-bit pixels and limited color palettes. The technology at the time was so basic that you had to choose whether you wanted to have great graphics or great sound, and sacrifices had to be made at almost every design meeting.
These days, that's not a problem. Modern hardware can make millions of colors and high-def sound without any effort at all, making it trivial to recreate something like Streets of Rage on something like a PlayStation 4.
But the more you update the game, the further away you get from the source. That was the challenge facing French developer Lizardcube as they tried to stay true to the original games while making Streets of Rage 4 for modern hardware.
"The most difficult thing with a project like this is that you want it to be like, you and your artistic vision, and what a project like this is worthy of," says Creative Director Ben Fiquet in a new interview. "This is a game which holds a special place in a lot of fans' hearts and there's a fine line between pleasing people and creating something new."
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Part of getting to that "special place" was finding just what made the original games so iconic, and part of that comes right at the first level. “The urban feel, the neon, the bricks on the ground... Those have really stayed strong in our memories, and I think it has always been an underlying inspiration as soon as you think of characters fighting in the streets."
Along with Background Artist Julian Nguyen You, Ben describes how they not only wanted to recreate the urban feel of the original games, they also wanted to pay homage in more subtle ways. One of them was added a corner to the first level of Streets of Rage 4 that mirrors the same corner found in Streets of Rage 2. Adding corners was actually incredibly difficult for the technology of the era, so Lizardcube spiced it up by also adding a feature that was just impossible in the original game: a car crashing into a wall.
Find out how they made the characters themselves feel like a pixel-art fighter while looking like a modern action hero in the video above.
Source: Dotemu on YouTube