VectorMan Retrospective

VectorMan. He’s mean, he’s green, and his legacy stands as one of the swan songs of Sega’s greatest console. In 1994, Rare blew gamers away with Donkey Kong Country and its pre-rendered 3D models while Nintendo speculated that the

Genesis was incapable of such graphical feats without it’s expensive 32X add-on. Enter BlueSky Software in 1995, who developed the Genesis programming technique “Vector Piece Animation” which allowed programmers to “coordinate the movements of several individual sprites at one time and combine them to create complex onscreen images.” This means that instead of using one sprite for VectorMan, they were able to utilize 23 individual orbs to animate the character.

VectorMan’s World

VectorMan 1 and 2 take place on a heavily polluted Earth in 2049. Humanity, having left to pursue greener pastures, has left mechanical “orbots” to clean up the mess (Eat your heart out Wall-E). VectorMan is portrayed as an everyman’s robot, piloting a trash barge through space to dispose of refuse by dumping it into the sun. One of the orbots overseeing Earth’s recovery is accidentally fused to a nuclear missile, which drives him insane. “Warhead” then proceeds to hack all the orbots on Earth while VectorMan is away, leaving him the only one capable of restoring order. According to Rich Karpp, the game’s creator, “I’m happy we used an environmental…