Clay animation had been abandoned in favour of polygons. A 2D platformer sequel to The Neverhood, called Skullmonkeys, came and went in 1998 without much fanfare. As 3D modelling rapidly improved and became cheaper to use, game designers moved away from using clay models. The Neverhood was the zenith of 1990s stop-motion videogames, and a remarkable achievement, but it also marked a period of decline. But The Neverhood featured real-life sets sculpted from clay, and everything was created using cameras and painstakingly poised figurines. Previous titles had used clay models for certain characters, while generating levels and backgrounds using a computer. And Claymates, from the same studio as ClayFighter, was a vibrant 1994 platformer that used plasticine models for all of the characters and enemies.īut the real breakthrough came with The Neverhood in 1996, a point and click adventure that marked the first time a videogame was made entirely using stop-motion animation. Primal Rage the following year was another claymation fighting game, this time featuring dinosaurs and apes that were reminiscent of Ray Harryhausen’s special effects work on movies like Jason And The Argonauts and Clash Of The Titans. 1993’s ClayFighter was a parody of Street Fighter II that used clay models for all of the fighters, and it was successful enough to spawn two sequels. More games followed that featured an even greater reliance on stop motion. At the time, 3D computer modelling was difficult and required costly hardware, so capturing images of a real-life model provided a relatively easy shortcut. Goro, a four-armed boss character in 1992’s Mortal Kombat, was created using stop-motion animation, as were the enemy characters in the pioneering 1993 first-person shooter DOOM. There was a surge of interest in using clay models for making videogames in the early 1990s.
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