Holy trout: Someone Dug Up a Ton of High Resolution Art From FFIX's Production

[XxSephirothxX]

A guy who posts on the gaming forum NeoGAF has a reputation for digging obsessively into games he likes to find all kinds of old concept art, cut content, little snippets of story, and so on. He just did it for FFIX, and he found some pretty awesome stuff.

More specifically, he found a ton of art assets that made it into the game as pre-rendered backgrounds. Only these renders are high resolution, at least compared to the PS1's 320x240 resolution. Much, much higher.

Do the actual renders still exist on some Square Enix file servers somewhere? Maybe not, or maybe they didn't use such hi-res assets for the entire game. If they did, we probably would've seen a FFIX HD re-release by now. It all still looks very much like 2000-era CGI, but I think the style holds up remarkably well at a higher resolution.

Check out the whole thread here. There are probably close to 100 images, including a lot of concept art that may be pretty rare or only available in a Final Fantasy art book.

[Snakz92]

the last image looks really smoothed out. Reminds me of the FF7 on PC graphics. everything is the same, just really smoothed out.


BUT HOLY SMOKES IS THIS AMAZING!!!
dang ps1!

[Rostum]

Wow, amazing! So much attention to detail by the artists.

[Mirage]

the last image looks really smoothed out. Reminds me of the FF7 on PC graphics. everything is the same, just really smoothed out.

But it isn't.

[Jinx]

Omg, so beautiful. ;-;

I have to check out this site at some point.

[Rantz]

Wow! I wonder how he finds this stuff?

[XxSephirothxX]

Wow! I wonder how he finds this stuff?

He does a ton of digging through artist portfolios, resumes and such, which can take a huge amount of time. He probably looked through the entire credits of the game, noted all the artists, tracked down as many as he could on LinkedIn and such, found their personal blogs/websites, then ferreted out this art. Commitment!

[Rantz]

Well I can respect that. It's certainly a lot of extra value.

[Depression Moon]

What part of the game was this in
http://i.imgur.com/1ZLKoVj.jpg

It looks familiar. I want to say a shop, but there would be a counter somewhere in there

[Snakz92]

Thats probably on the prima vista.

[Rantz]

Yeah, it's on the Prima Vista. It's where Zidane, Blank and Cinna run out from during the play in the beginning.

[Cloudane]

Awesome.

Makes you wonder about the feasibility of a HD remaster some time in the future..

[Night Fury]

I hate you Azar. I was just about to write this as an article.

[XxSephirothxX]

I hate you Azar. I was just about to write this as an article.

You still should!

[Elpizo]

I don't remember who said it, but it looks like whoever said "This game should have been on PS2" was right.

Wow... Hard time imagining IX being even better than it already is. O.o