Games
Spyro is back in glorious form with a remastered trilogy and we caught up with developers Insomniac and Toys for Bob to talk about the challenge of keeping the purple dragon true to his roots.
The original Spyro trilogy holds a special place for a lot of people who spent their childhood in front of a PlayStation. Spyro the Dragon, Spyro 2: Ripto's Rage! and Spyro: Year of the Dragon were a series that stole players’ hearts and the family-friendly gaming crown from the grip of Nintendo’s red hatted friend.
“We wanted to take a chance on something way back after we made Disruptor,” said Insomniac President and Spyro developer Ted Price. “I had always wanted to make a game about a dragon.”
Although its visuals and mechanics have aged, the wonderful gliding, magical tunes, and quirky lines still hold up 20 years later. The challenge for Toys for Bob, the developers behind the reignited trilogy, was keeping those elements intact while revamping the visuals in a way that recaptured the spirit of the original trilogy. The PS4, and rumoured PC and Switch versions, have a lot more power to work with and it shows this time around.
That power gave Toys for Bob the ability to make Spyro more detailed than ever, even if they had to start from scratch. A lot of the design documents, level layouts, and other important info from the original game wasn’t available for the new team to dissect, so they had to get a little creative in their approach.
Inside the special Spyro-scope
The design team at Toys for Bob created what they call the Spyro-scope. An emulation tool that mapped the original games paths, hitboxes and all, as they played. “It was important that everything was in the same place, including gems, enemies and all that,” said Toys for Bob art director Josh Nadelberg. “The Spyro-scope could extract things like the levels mesh, so the layout would be identical in the new game. We’d just paint over it with more detailed designs.”
The new team did more than just add a little art, they made the world come to life. They added the ability for grass to catch on fire and gave enemies far more intricate designs so they’d feel real when you interacted with them.
One of the key redesigns they tackled was the dragons that Spyro saves throughout his adventure. “Those dragons are all characters too, so we wanted each to look a bit different,” Nadelberg added. “Magic Crafters would look different than Peace Keepers and Beast Makers, something that wasn’t possible back in the 90s.”
In the original game the dragons are divided into five families, the three listed above and the Dream Weavers and Artisans. Each family came from a different region and specialised in a profession, the Peace Keepers acted as the military, while the Magic Crafters focused on sorcery. It’s natural that they’d all look different and the modern visuals make those differences pop.
From Pete to purple
The famous purple dragon himself went through a ton of changes for this new trilogy and he’s grown to be a handsome devil in his old age. Toys for Bob were once again unable to source work from the original model, so they had to start from scratch.
“We had to take notes from screen shots of the old games,” Nadelberg said. “The question came to be: how do we recreate him when thousands more pixels are available now then there were back then. I think there are more in his pupil now then his whole original design.”
Toys for Bob had a monumental task of not only recreating the Spyro everyone loves, but also adding in animations and more sound effects that weren’t possible when Insomniac created him. They sat down with the original team to pick their brains and learn about how the creators viewed Spyro.
They learned that creating Spyro was as spontaneous as dragon fire. The character originally started out as a green dragon named Pete, since he reminded Price of Disney’s Pete’s Dragon. They knew they couldn’t keep the name and the name Spyro was a combination of all sorts of things.
“We looked at studies where ‘s’ words were more popular, where words that end with 'o' are popular, even things like ‘Spa’ being popular in Japan,” laughed Insomniac chief creative strategist Brian Hastings. We eventually ended up with Spyro; it didn’t work at first when I mentioned it, but the team came around when someone else did.”
“It was kind of a scramble,” Price added. “We were coming down to the wire.”
Spyro's popular purple was also chosen a little later in the game since Insomniac though that green had been done before, they needed something else. “We had a big poster of Spyro in a rainbow of different colours,” Price said. “We found reasons not to go with other colours, like red bled into certain backgrounds. Purple was the only one that looked good in every environment.”
The adventure of Spyro’s creation included a ton of work to get to the icon we know now. Price and his team are confident that the work Toys for Bob has done is an extension of their original dream with a little extra mixed in as well.
Matching the original magic
While visuals, especially ones from the original PlayStation era, can age drastically over a couple of decades, classic music can stay timeless for centuries. That’s how a ton of people feel about Stewart Copeland’s soundtrack for the original trilogy.
Copeland, who played drums for The Police in their heyday, had never scored a game before Spyro and most of the team at Insomniac didn’t even think he’d join the project. “We knew we wanted it to be a lighthearted sound,” said former Universal Interactive producer Michael John. “When we started to put together a list of demo tapes from artists I slipped Copeland's in. Everyone was like ‘that’s the one’ and I said ‘of course it is – that’s Stewart Copeland.’”
John didn’t believe that Copeland would be up for a project like this, but after a few calls and a meeting at Copeland's home it was a done deal. “The music I wrote for Spyro was some of the best stuff I’ve ever written,” said Copeland, who now works with classical music. “I go back to it whenever I need inspiration for my orchestra.”
Copeland wrote more than 30 tracks by only using electronic equipment over three years, but was limited by game development technology at the time. He couldn’t add a lot of extra tidbits to make the world feel more real.
Luckily today's tech is a little more powerful. That’s why Stephan Vankov, the reignited trilogy’s composer, went to extra lengths to make them sound even better than the originals.
“It’s obvious that we can do a lot more with the music 20 years later,” Vankov said. “For example, Spyro’s charge move has an escalation of rhythm when you use it. That wasn’t possible before.”
“We had all these plans for the original game, but not enough bandwidth for all of it,” Copeland added. “This time a lot of those plans have made it into the game, so in some ways it's more true to the original vision than ours was.”
While the reignited trilogy may never be able to replace the classic adventures of the purple dragon, Toys for Bob is doing everything in their power to try. They have new art, animation, character designs and vice acting – all approved by the original team of developers. “They really understand who Spyro is,” Price said. “So the animations, the designs can really capture his personality.”
