The Making of Xevious (1983)

A video game is essentially interactive animation on a computer. They are crafted using advanced technologies far beyond the capabilities of personal computers, but have you ever wondered how these "computer animation games"1 are actually brought to life on our screens? How does their creation differ from, or perhaps resemble, the way you might develop a game on a PC? Let's take a look.

This article draws parallels between video games and blockbuster films to trace the entire development process. Our subject, Xevious, is the pinnacle of computer animation games, unveiled by Namco at the end of January. Without further ado, let's meet the team behind Xevious.

When the production of Xevious first got underway, the initial objective was to create a game with a scrolling background. "We decided to craft it as a Scramble-style hybrid that combined destroying ground targets with aerial combat." (Department Manager Masaya Nakamura, R&D)

Namco's earlier action games were characterized by colorful scrolling starfields in the background, exemplified by titles like Galaxian and Galaga. Equally important was their experience making driving games: with hits like Rally-X and Pole Position, Namco had acquired a great deal of know-how in scrolling game mechanics.

Combining these two vectors to build a fresh new game became the core theme of Xevious. Easy as "screen scrolling" sounds, however, it's a tough nut to crack. The sheer volume of data involved would mean a lengthy development, making it essential to deliver a high-quality game with real market longevity.

Work immediately began on a project proposal. Here, a proposal refers to a document outlining the game content and design philosophy. It's essentially a pitch, but also a declaration: "This is the game we are going to make." The original proposal for Xevious detailed a modern warfare game featuring helicopters. The core gameplay revolved around air-to-ground skirmishes, where players fought off anti-aircraft fire from the ground alongside enemy helicopters launching homing missiles.

"Ground targets were set to appear only once or twice a minute, and shooting their radar would simply tone down the enemy's attacks." (Section Chief Toru Iwatani, R&D Planning)

However, this proposal was soon revised. "A modern warfare setting inevitably brought too much mundane realism to the experience. As a general principle, I wanted to avoid making a game where humans fight each other." (Masanobu Endo, R&D Division 1)

Endo, who was put in charge of developing Xevious, was a huge fan of science fiction, anime, and cinema. As an anime fan who came of age in the post-Gundam era, he put forward a sub-theme: "How can we make a video game move like a TV anime?"

It was an attempt to break away from conventional video game methodologies, which relied on four-directional movement and swapping between just two character sprite patterns to depict motion. Thus, a revised proposal incorporating these ideas was drafted, shifting the game's setting from modern military combat to the near future.

Building the Xevious World

Based on the revised proposal, technical specifications were then drawn up. In this context, a specification document is a technical brief given to hardware engineers and programmers so they can construct a game circuit board in line with the proposal. Within this document lies the initial blueprint of the game.

"I wanted to make a video game with a real sense of narrative. As my creative drive for the game soared, I ended up penning a whole three-part sci-fi epic. I even put together a collection of supplementary lore materials." (Endo) This Xevious prose story integrated a fictional Xevious language, unique numeric symbols, and more. In terms of development scale alone, Xevious was already starting to rival an animated feature film.

In short, an entire world had been constructed from scratch. "I don't think there's ever been anything quite like this before." (Section Chief Toru Iwatani)

Rather than a standard game scenario, the story functioned more as a pre-history for the game world. However, as the document was passed around among the development team, it allowed everyone to establish distinct personalities for every single enemy character, substantially enhancing the Xevious' overall narrative depth.

Hardware Production Launch

With that, development of the prototype hardware began. This prototype machine was built in faithful adherence to the specifications, designed explicitly to test how well the ideas on paper could be realized in practice.

Once the prototype was finished, work was temporarily paused so the entire team could evaluate their progress with a fresh perspective. After all, game development is a long journey lasting anywhere from a year to a year and a half. Staying immersed in the production pipeline can cause developers to lose sight of how the game actually plays. The whole team playtested the build and held a critique session. So how did the results turn out?

"An enemy looking like a concrete slab came spinning toward the player on screen. The moment I saw it, I thought, 'Ah, this works.'" (Department Manager Nakamura)

That concrete slab was none other than the enemy construct seen in the finished game: Bacura. Bacura deflects all attacks from the Solvalou, forcing players to skillfully dodge around it as they advance. This mechanic injected tremendous dynamic tension into the gameplay of Xevious.

In truth, this construct was a character Endo created after studying the movement techniques of TV animation. "Using too many colors makes it difficult to give sprites believable motion. So I made a simple spinning sprite using just two shades of gray and then ran simulations over and over." (Endo) The resulting sprite struck everyone on the team as fresh and novel, instilling a firm sense of confidence that they were onto something special.

"Xevious" Art Design Begins

At this stage, the design section kicked into high gear.

Namco maintains an internal department known as the Creative Center, which handles everything from video game character design to industrial design and proposals for new arcade space aesthetics. "It's an independent section set up to elevate design work and unify Namco's corporate identity and image." (Chief Designer Tadashi Yamashita)

Looking around the Creative Center, the atmosphere resembles that of a design department at an advertising agency. The one difference from an ordinary company, however, is the video game character figures decorating the desks and shelves. Seeing Pac-Man and Dig Dug scattered around the room instantly reminds you that you're at Namco.

"The most difficult part of video game character design is that everything ultimately has to be expressed as pixel patterns on a CRT screen. You have to push the graphic work forward while anticipating how it will look on screen, but there's always a disconnect between an image on paper and a character actually moving on screen." (Designer Shigeki Toyama)

Visuals weren't the priority during the prototype stage. As long as you could tell a helicopter from a jet, that was plenty. It was only after the prototype was finished (once the sprites were actually moving on screen) that the graphic design process began in earnest to create more appealing and innovative characters.

First, rough sketches were drawn to capture the characters' concepts. In film, these are known as image boards (Star Wars had even hired a dedicated illustrator, Ralph McQuarrie, for this purpose). The Xevious team held meetings to evaluate the rough sketches. The discussions were lively, and led to second drafts or completely re-drawn designs.

For instance, the giant fortress Andor Genesis started out as a disk-shaped rough sketch inspired by a sea urchin shell washed up on the beach. However, feedback calling for a design with a stronger sense of three-dimensional volume led to a second draft: an octagonal structure complete with shading, which served as the prototype for its current design.

This trial-and-error process closely mirrored movie production. As is evident when reading behind-the-scenes accounts like The Making of 2001: A Space Odyssey, active exchanges among staff allow initial ideas to be expanded, modified, or condensed, ultimately forging a highly refined final work.

Once the final drafts are approved, artists convert them into pixel art by drawing each character cell-by-cell on graph paper. The development team then uses their proprietary graphics tools to digitize those sheets into playable character data.

"The biggest success of this design phase was unifying the entire aesthetic using shades of gray. By dividing gray into multiple tone levels from light to dark and leveraging fine color gradations, we created a layout that's both highly readable and rich in three-dimensional depth." (Toyama)

Development Restart!

With the designs finalized, work returned to the R&D department. To achieve the animated look that had been a core concept of Xevious from the start, the team decided to make red lights pulse on the core power sections of enemy characters. "We took inspiration from the glowing backlighting effects used in anime. In terms of lore, it represents the pulsing of a mysterious energy source powering the enemy." (Endo, R&D) In practice, this red pulsing light builds up in four color stages from complete darkness to peak brightness before fading back down. This elaborate effect is rendered by constantly swapping across five separate screen buffers.

To push the narrative depth of the game even further, meticulous care was poured into designing the ground geoglyphs. If you pay close attention while playing, you'll realize that Xevious features one massive continuous map, across which your ship, the Solvalou, scans forward while gradually drifting slightly to the left. As proof, the Nazca lines—which are only partially visible on the left side at first—slowly shift into the center of the screen as you progress.

Drawing these ground geoglyphs was a monumental task. In the end, the design staff laid out sheets of paper covering the area of several tatami mats across the floor, tackling the artwork as an all-hands effort.

Running parallel to this artwork phase, work finally began on designing the arcade board's circuit layout, as well as software debugging and refinement. At this stage, given the unit price of an arcade machine (around 500,000 yen), finding a way to reduce the cost of the hardware became a critical priority. Once a printed circuit layout is finalized, hardware modifications become extremely difficult, requiring a tremendous effort from the hardware engineers.

Under the hood, Xevious essentially inherited the proprietary architecture Namco had refined through Galaga and Bosconian. The board configuration uses three Z-80 CPUs: one dedicated exclusively to audio, one handling sprites, and the third controlling overall system operations.

Xevious in Your Hands

Thus completed, Namco's new arcade game, Xevious, was mass-produced and shipped out to local arcades everywhere. Boarding the Solvalou, players took to the skies above the Nazca lines to intercept the incoming enemy forces. Now that you know the immense effort the staff poured into realizing this unprecedented computer animation game, you can savor every bit of what makes it so special.

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