Modern games reimagined as old games: God of War

War. War never changes. But gaming does. Space marines, modern warfare... it's a far cry from the animals and plumbers of yesteryear. So we thought it would be fun to reimagine five modern games as title screens on classic gaming consoles. But this isn't a quick Photoshop job. No, this is a fully animated title sequence video, complete with audio. We're doing a new one every day this week, each on a different retro platform. Today's is God of War, reimagined as a Commodore 64 title screen.

So welcome to 1985! The ear-splitting sounds, the migraine-inducing bars of colours… they don't make 'em like this anymore, that's for sure. I've used a heavily restricted colour palette for the picture of Kratos, and chopped up audio from one of the cut-scenes in God of War 3.

To emulate the sampling technology of the time, I exported the audio several times at 8-bit quality, scooping out the bass and treble as I went, while turning up the gain to distort it. I also chopped off the end of the word 'revenge' because memory was at a premium in those days, making even a long word too much for the system to cope with. "I WILL HAVE... MY REVEN!"

The music was made by sampling a long note from a Commodore 64, then pitch-shifting it to replicate (very roughly!) the theme from God of War.

As for the title, 'Kratos The Angry Spartan' fits the slight daftness of 80s computer games. There would definitely be loads of pixellated blood in this one. And of course it would be graphically superior to the Speccy version (especially if you had a 48K model, in which case you could say goodbye to that music).

Tomorrow? 1989. Now, which machine do you think that will be?

03 Oct, 2011