Unboxing ASMR video! Our new 3D printer has arrived with which we will make the protagonists of the Army Men games a reality in our physical world, making plastic soldiers go where no Army Men had gone before.
#ArmyMen #Unboxing #ASMR #3DPrint #AnycubicPhotonMono4K
We learned from Michael Mendheim’s Twitter account that there are a series of files on paper and, possibly, on some digital medium, of Army Men, as can be read in one of the photos. We’ll keep you posted if any of that ever comes to light.
30 years of work being archived by @frankcifaldi and @kelslewin at the Video Game History Foundation @GameHistoryOrg. Design docs of Mutant League games, Army Men, Battletanx, Four Horsemen and a treasure trove of never released designs. @DigitalDreamsE @MutantFootball pic.twitter.com/rQrPUA6UNn
— Michael Mendheim (@mmendheim) June 21, 2022
It’s a complicated subject, the Army Men series. The 3DO Company released somewhere in the realm of 25 games between 1998 and 2002. When you consider some of the ports were made from the ground up and entirely distinctive to the platform they were released on, the actual number of unique games is probably around 35 or more. I’m sure you can already see the problem.
“The problem was with all the early success of these Army Men games, the executives at 3DO thought they could ship an Army Men game (or bundle) every quarter and be successful,” Michael Mendheim, creative director of Battletanx and the Sarge’s Heroes subseries, told me. It’s obvious. The output was stunning, putting even history’s most prolific market spammers, like Guitar Hero, to shame. What started as a promising series with a few hits on its hands quickly declined into one that was treated with scorn and derision by players and the press.
The result is that the Army Men games are poorly remembered. I’ve previously compared the series to a shotgun blast: a sudden and abrupt spread, sometimes causing a lot of agony. Few mourned the loss of the franchise, but I still visit to place flowers on its grave.
The 3DO Company was founded by Trip Hawkins, who previously founded Electronic Arts years earlier. Hawkins dreamt of a console that would become the universal medium for games. Licensing fees would be almost non-existent, so developers and publishers would jump aboard with little risk, abandoning frontrunners Nintendo and Sega. Hawkins left EA to pursue this dream, but by 1996, the 3DO Interactive Multiplayer flopped under the weight of FMV game ports, and the company had to pivot to purely making software. Hawkins even took on a creative role to help out his teams.
Army Men started out quietly enough in 1998. The first game on PC, merely titled Army Men, was a reasonable success. Early the next year, Army Men II came out alongside a PlayStation remake of the first game called Army Men 3D. Again, these were pretty successful. By the end of 1999, however, a second PC title, Army Men: Toys in Space, the 3D action title Army Men: Sarge’s Heroes, and the top-down helicopter game Army Men: Air Attack were all released. Five titles in its second year, and the snowball had only just begun rolling.
That’s where Michael Mendheim comes in. In 1998, he was creative director on Battletanx, which was a hit for 3DO. He was then given creative license on his own Army Men title and envisioned a character-driven game with more of a story, and that became Sarge’s Heroes.
Once again, Sarge’s Heroes was a hit. If I can wade into the story for a moment, it’s where I was introduced to the series, and it’s one that still holds a place in my heart. It had its rough spots, but a lot of its design, especially when it came to its levels, was fantastic. I remember following it through Nintendo Power up to its release and playing the hell out of it.
While I’ve trudged through a great deal of the Army Men series since then and could give you the full and detailed history, that’s quite a detour. We’re going to hurry the story along here.
The important fact is that not only did the quality of Army Men titles start to plummet almost immediately, but the public’s appetite for the games declined just as fast. I’d say that the four PlayStation Army Men: World War games are pretty consistent fun, but by the release of the last two titles, the press was practically ignoring them.
It became something of a laughing stock. In 2001, Portal Runner was released to harsh reception. After a particularly scathing review in Gamepro Magazine, Trip Hawkins even went as far as writing to the Editor-in-Chief to defend the title in an almost comical fashion. He described the staff as “angry young men” and threatened to reduce their advertising. I can understand him wanting to defend his creation, but the letter wasn’t a good look.
Around 2002, the pace of releases from 3DO had slowed and the writing was on the wall. “We already had a round of layoffs; everyone was nervous about the company’s future,” said Mendheim. He had a team working on a game called Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. “It was an edgy, gritty, post-apocalyptic nightmare, based on the Book of Revelation.” Mendheim also believed this to be the best chance at saving 3DO, but it wasn’t to be. “I was called into a meeting and told that I could keep a small team working on Horsemen but everyone else, including myself, would need to make another Army Men game. That Army Men game would be Sarge’s War.”
Sarge’s War would be the last 3DO developed Army Men game, put together in haste as the company took on water. “Honestly, it was like developing the game on the Titanic and it took 9 months for the ship to sink,” described Mendheim.
If you’ve played Sarge’s War, you may have been stricken with how tonally different it was from previous games. The series’ standard features were there, but a lot of the color was washed out of it. In its place was a grittier veneer, even over its more cartoonish elements. The entire supporting cast of the Sarge’s Heroes sub-series–all of them–were killed in an explosion, sending Sergeant Hawk into an avenging rage.
This was the sound of a series dying. There are plenty of franchises that have disappeared from the face of the planet, never to be heard from again. Jazz Jackrabbit, Top Gear, F-Zero; there are many easy examples of games that have just…gone away. Sarge’s War was a game on its deathbed, one last defiant scream before the embrace of oblivion. It was a deliberate move to put the final nail in the coffin and bring closure to the series.
I think Michael Mendheim put it best. “There are certain games that you just put your heart and soul into because you love the content, they are your babies. Sarge’s Heroes was one of those games for me. Every character in the game was developed with love and passion. Sarge’s Heroes was fun, positive, and hopeful. It was a game that made you laugh and feel some magic.”
“Sarge’s War was the opposite of that. It was grim and dark. The story in Sarge’s War was about loss. Losing everything that you love and care about. In the plotline, the entire cast and crew – Sarge’s Heroes died with 3DO. Everyone except for Sarge.”
“When I killed off Sarge’s Heroes, I also killed my desire to ever design another Army Men game. I designed the first and last game in the Sarge’s Heroes product line.”
By the end of development, 3DO had already breathed its last, and Sarge’s War wound up getting released by Global Star Software, a subsidiary of Take-Two and the new home of the Army Men license. Some sources credit Tactical Development for completing the game, but according to Mendheim, “Our orders were to finish the game and that is what we did…the game was delivered completed as the ship went down.”
In comparison to the Army Men games that came before it, Sarge’s War was less rickety. It’s obvious that some of 3DO’s best remaining talent had worked on it, though under less than ideal constraints. It doesn’t reach the height of the series, but knowing the story behind it underlines it with melancholy. It’s a surreal experience.
“There are no bad guys in this story; everyone did their absolute best to try and keep the company alive,” explains Mendheim. “No one sets out to make a bad game. No one worked harder than Trip Hawkins, who even put his own money on the line to try and save the company. Unfortunately, not every story has a happy ending.”
Global Star made a token effort at continuing the Army Men series. Their first attempt was Team 17’s Army Men: Major Malfunction in 2006, which I’ve previously covered, and it’s awful. Later they’d try another reboot with Army Men: Soldiers of Misfortune in 2008, which is similarly terrible. There was a mobile game for pre-smart phones, and then that’s it. Aside from a few re-releases, the series has been left to rest peacefully.
Whether or not it deserved that fate is a matter of opinion. On one hand, it was unwise and intrusive to flood the market with those titles. Releasing games of questionable quality to bank on a brand should never be commended. But on the other hand, they weren’t without merit or appeal. The best games were just buried under the worst. It could have been straightened out. It didn’t have to end this way.
Or, as Michael Mendheim put it: “I always look back at my time at 3DO and think what could have been if we had managed the brand better by releasing only one Army Men game a year and each year releasing a different type of Army Men game with cool innovations and game mechanics…maybe, just maybe Army Men and 3DO might still be alive.”
During the mid-to-late 1990s, as video games began branching out beyond traditional genres, a surprisingly simple idea sparked the birth of one of gaming’s most memorable franchises. That spark was to bring the iconic green plastic toy soldiers (the Army Men) to digital life. What followed was a mix of action, strategy, and tongue-in-cheek satire that would grow into a universe of its own: the early foundations of what we now call the Toyverse.
The project emerged from The 3DO Company, founded by industry pioneer Trip Hawkins, who had already changed gaming history with Electronic Arts. At that time, 3DO was primarily focused on software development and searching for its next big concept… something that could blend strategy, humor, and accessibility. The result went far beyond expectation, shaping not just a game, but a world of plastic warfare and nostalgic imagination.
It all began in 1996, when Keith Bullen, an art designer from Electronic Arts, was hired by 3DO to direct the visuals for a new project, then tentatively called War Sports. The goal was to create something in the spirit of Return Fire, 3DO’s popular vehicular shooter, but with stronger squad-based mechanics. Marketing wanted an “E for Everyone” rating, an idea ironically tied to the ESRB system that Trip Hawkins himself had helped establish.
“I remember various marketing meetings when ideas like green blood and making the soldiers robots were brought up as ways to get the game a friendly rating. I didn’t like any of these ideas.” – Keith recalls
At that time, that’s what was done with Half-Life to sell it in Germany: making the human enemies… robots.
Months passed without a clear direction, until Bullen had a eureka moment. He thought back to his childhood days, setting up tiny armies in the backyard and taking turns throwing rocks with his brother to knock them down. That memory (of creativity, chaos, and fun) became the emotional core of Army Men.
The toy soldiers had long been a universal symbol of imagination. From the Louis Marx playsets of the 1950s to Toy Story in 1995, these little green figures had stood the test of time. By centering the game around them, Bullen found a way to capture both nostalgia and originality, something fun for players who wanted a break from the gritty realism and machismo of other war games.
Once the toy soldier idea took hold, Keith’s role evolved from art director to lead designer.
“Once the soldiers became plastic, we had to come up with a universe with real terrains and plastic soldiers,” he says. “We wanted the world to feel serious to the Army Men characters’ point of view but fun and nostalgic for the player.”
This is key: “The (plastic) world had to feel real and serious for the Army Men.” With these words, coming from Keith Bullen himself, we can cement this as a fact, dispelling any doubt or denial: For the inhabitants of the Plastic World, war is not a joke… it’s serious. That’s why Sarge’s War isn’t excluded from the equation (as many fans wish), because whether we like it or not, it respects this original principle of the idea behind Army Men.
The team paid careful attention to the way plastic behaved in real life, how light hit its glossy surface, how it bent, shattered, and melted.
“We paid close attention to the physics in the animations. It was very important to me that the plastic pieces reacted to the world as if they were made of the same light plastic as the original figures.”
But turning that idea into a finished product wasn’t easy. The small team of six soon grew to more than ten as Bullen became creative director.
“It was very challenging convincing the team to adopt my new gameplay ideas… It took several months to finally get everyone on board.”
Executives were another obstacle. Early pitches for Army Men were dismissed as childish, “too young” some said. RTS fans, they argued, wouldn’t take seriously a game about toys. Yet Bullen persisted, finding clever ways to win people over.
“I then bought a 3D model of a generic Army Man and brought in some classic toy green and tan Army Men to use as pose references,” he remembers.
“For several weeks, many people from every department in the company would stop to discuss the posed 3D model… Soon after, the momentum switched from the product being perceived as too juvenile to being an awesome nostalgic experience.”
This is key: “I then bought a 3D model of a generic Army Man”. This is a direct confirmation of the source of the classic Army Men 3D model: it was purchased, obtained from 3D model packages, in this case the ViewPoint DataLabs ones (and it’s not the only 3D model from third party sources).
That was the turning point. Nostalgia had done its job.
The next challenge was translating the tactile world of toy soldiers into an interactive one. The developers recreated classic units like riflemen and bazooka troopers, while experimenting with how plastic would melt or break apart.
“We destroyed many plastic Army Men in the 3DO parking lot for the sake of realistic plastic physics,” Keith admits.
“The enhanced fear of fire when you are made of plastic was a theme we relied on throughout the series.”
To tie everything together, Army Men adopted a satirical tone. The game opened with a mock newsreel showing the totalitarian Tans preparing to invade the Greens.
“We watched many hours of authentic old reels… The Tan leader gesturing like Mussolini was one of my favourite segments.”
Originally planned as a real-time strategy game, Army Men evolved into something more direct and personal. Players would take control of Sarge, a Green Army hero.
By the way, it was the RTT (Real Time Tactics) videogame, not a RTS. At least we called it that way today.
“I’ve always preferred arcade-like action games over strategy games,” says Keith.
“So I redesigned the game around the central character of Sarge… as in games like Ikari Warriors.”
The final product blended tactical movement with fast-paced action.
“The gameplay became more about tactics, rather than strategy,” Bullen notes, crediting Crusader: No Remorse as an influence.
One of the concept’s earliest champions was 3DO founder Trip Hawkins himself.
“Toy soldiers were my dominant play pattern as a child and I’d always invented strong storylines and adventures around them,” he says.
“Besides all the World War soldiers, I had Swoppets from the Wars Of The Roses, Roman centurions, and others – including cowboys, of course.”
Hawkins immediately recognized the blend of nostalgia, humor, and design potential behind Army Men.
“It inspired me to do something more central with humour in the genre and a stronger narrative.”
To him, the plastic theme wasn’t just an aesthetic choice: it was a creative platform.
“We were focused on the US market… nobody cared about them, because they’d not grown up with those toys.”
Despite the game’s playful tone, Hawkins insisted that warfare and destruction were essential to the experience.
“Creatively, we also wanted to have fun repeating some of the famous play patterns from childhood… It allowed us to cast our villains with a bit of sadism, that is still funny because… they’re just toys.”
The development cycle lasted just over a year, despite several restarts. Once the formula clicked, Hawkins knew they had something special.
“This is what we live for in game development and publishing… to do something we really believe in and love.”
Across three themed terrains (desert, alpine, and swamp) Army Men culminated in a memorable twist: Sarge crossing into the Real World, a scene that would directly lead into Army Men II. The franchise quickly exploded, selling over 7 million copies across every major platform and generating more than $300 million in revenue.
Looking back, Bullen reflects on the impact of that first title:
“I never would have imagined that it would spawn 23 sequels and spin-offs… My goal was to create a game that I would want to play and not a clone of a game I had played before.”
Indeed, Army Men defied easy classification. It was part shooter, part strategy, part parody… a digital sandbox that reimagined childhood battles through the eyes of living toys. Beneath the surface, it captured something universal: the creative spirit of play itself.
From Sarge’s Heroes to the ever-expanding Toyverse, the legacy of those little plastic soldiers continues to march on.
Original source: Retro Gamer (2019), “The Making Of: Army Men” by Hareth Al Bustani.
https://www.pressreader.com/uk/retro-gamer/20190516/281672551382117
Edited and adapted for armymen.com.ar
The first very revealing article was Team17’s recalling history of their first 100 games, when celebrating the release of game number one hundred, PLANET ALPHA. In this chapter, they’re heading to 2005 & 2006, a time of both 2D and 3D Worms games and their first foray into work-for-hire projects on both Lemmings and Army Men.
In an unexpected twist, Team17 was granted creative freedom while working on the Army Men franchise. This allowed them to introduce a new main character and even eliminate the recurring character, Sarge, in the opening sequence. This bold move highlights the unique creative liberties Team17 enjoyed during the development process. You can read the complete article in: https://team17.com
(…)
When Team17 was founded in 1990 it was entirely possible, thanks to open platforms like the Amiga, for a small group of programmers and artists to make and release their own game. But times changed. As next generation consoles took over, team sizes grew and budgets ballooned. Releasing a game was virtually impossible without publisher support and this meant you had a limited number of ways to get a game made. Either own a best-selling IP or develop for somebody else’s. In this climate, Team17 found itself pitching to publishers for “work-for-hire” projects. Sometimes this led to us working on a game like Lemmings, other times it led to Army Men: Major Malfunction… Perhaps the most surprising game in our entire history.
Recruited to Team17 after a 10-year stint at Rare, Gavin Hood found himself in command of the Army Men project and worked on the pitch. “I had literally only joined the company a few months before and was sitting opposite the head of design,” says Hood. “I remember most of the designers were working hard on a Worms title as it neared the end of production so I was asked to come up with something to pitch. I guess it went okay because we got the deal and I got the chance to lead it.”
Working on someone else’s franchise, you’d think that the publisher would have final say on any creative decisions but actually, as Hood explains, Team17 were given free rein on Army Men and even got away with a few unexpected choices. “We wanted to use a different main character to many of the other Army Men games and not only did we not meet resistance to this, but we even microwaved recurring main character Sarge in the opening sequence to set up the introduction of our own character. I’m actually proud that we were able to melt a series character in the opening of a game and everyone concerned be okay with that!”
Every game has its unique challenges and for Army Men it was designing a 3D world in the era before off-the-shelf game engines made the process more streamlined. “The programmers wrote a set of tools that, because of the limited time we had, were made to work on development kits using the Xbox Controller,” Hood explains. “We had to place enemies, assign A.I. to them and set their patrols all using an Xbox Pad, even the cutscenes were done in the same way. Using those tools was a nightmare but the advantage was we could throw a load of stuff into a level and just hit play. It was awful to use with a pad but the speed at which we could test ideas and get something into each of the environments is probably the only reason we hit deadlines.”
“It was an interesting game to work on,” concludes Hood. “I remember having grand ideas about what the game would end up being and although it might not have exactly reached those heights there are some things I think we got right. There are a lot of pop culture references in there that I still think we handled well .” Even the subtitle, “Major Malfunction”, was a reference to a line from Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket!
“Looking back, the game obviously wasn’t a masterpiece but everyone on the team got everything done in a very short development time with makeshift tools! It probably won’t go down as Team17’s finest hour or be the game I’m proudest of, but I did at least get to buy a lot toy soldiers and put them all over the office!”
(…)
Before 3D design and video game design, other talented artists had to face the challenge of making small beings look realistic, and showing giant environments from their perspective. In this first part of this series, we will reveal some of its ingenious secrets, knowledge that will help improve the experience of the small world of Army Men: Revolution
An article and interview made by VFXBLOG (https://vfxblog.com) December 19, 2017
Films like “Honey, I Shrunk The Kids”, The Indian in the Cupboard, Ant-Man, Fantastic Voyage, Inner Space, Willow, Hook, among others, are all movies that have used different techniques of visual effects to do large things smaller, or show how the world looks from the perspective of a plastic soldier.
The visual effects supervisor, Eric Brevig, has worked on this type of films, including one of our favorites, “The Indian in the Cupboard”, which presented visual effects by the ILM of George Lucas, a visual effects company created by “The Creator of Star Wars” to be able to make Star Wars.
These techniques have varied, from the forced perspective, large sets, filming on green or blue screen and, of course, digital media such as 3D.
But before reading this text we copied and pasted, with our opinions interjected, we ask you to go first to read it in the original source, attached below!
vfxblog: What had been your experience with any miniaturisation effects prior to The Indian in the Cupboard?
Eric Brevig: I had done certain short sequences in other projects. I did a 3D, double 70mm Disney EPCOT film for the theme park around 1980. It was like a dream sequence for a pavilion that they built there about imagination. And part of the dream sequence had the little boy, who was the main character, imagining that he was looking at a miniature circus, maybe three feet across, filled with tiny clowns a few inches tall and so forth. Then later on he shrunk down to fit into somebody’s hand.
And so that was the first time I had to really wrap my head around how you shoot mixed scale characters like that so that the perspective is correct and so forth. And since that was a 70mm 3D, meaning stereo 3D, project, there was much less tolerance for cheating things like scale and perspective.
I also did work on the Honey, I Shrunk the Audience for another Disney theme park several years later and just continued the same sort of things. I was on Hook at ILM as well with Tinkerbell. It was very familiar territory for me by the time The Indian in the Cupboard came up.
vfxblog: What is the major thing you think you have to get right with any kind of scale or miniaturisation work?
Eric Brevig: You have to be able to have the tiny element look like it was photographed from the same camera as the large element. And that means all aspects of photography – depth of field, shadow size, obviously camera position and camera motion and lighting. In Hook, because most of the time Tinkerbell was a fairy character that was glowing, the lighting became a combination of casting her light onto the background.
I remember we had a scene that I’d actually proposed to Steven Spielberg because I loved it in the Peter Pan animation, where the little Tinkerbell character walks up Peter’s shirt. Robin Williams was wearing a shirt and we had the character, Tinkerbell, walk through an ink pad so she left tiny little footprints. And it was just a lot of fun to work with Robin and getting him to, in a very tight close up, track his eyes where I was going to composite in the Tinkerbell character, and I gave him a little guide to follow. And then on overscale piece of blue screen set, we shot Julia Roberts following the same path.
But one thing that’s kind of fun when you’re doing little characters like that is that you can speed up the action because little things can move quickly. So I was adjusting the timing so that, at the rate that an adult Julia Roberts, full size, could walk up a set that looked like somebody’s blue chest, laying down of course, that her character, composited in, would track exactly where his eyes had been looking.
vfxblog: With Tinkerbell in Hook, and in several other films like Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, one of the main methods was to build over-sized sets. And then there’s also shooting the actors against bluescreen and compositing them in, and there were some forced perspective shots. But was that kind of the idea, to mix it up a bit, so that audience isn’t really quite sure how you’ve done it?
Eric Brevig: Yeah, I think that’s the most fun. We did one or two forced perspective shots, which I love to do and I kind of, growing up really was enamoured with the work that the Disney studios had done on Darby O’Gill and the Little People, which was all essentially forced perspective. There’s maybe one or two composited shots in the entire movie, but most of it was very sophisticated forced perspective and mirror shots, where a front surface mirror is partially removed, revealing a background set that’s painted and lined up precisely to match the foreground.
When I was a student in college, one of my student films, because I had no technical equipment to do anything sophisticated, was basically a mixed scale student film, where I bought $1 mirror tiles at the local construction supplies store and carefully scraped off the silver from the back and lined it up with the foreground set and the background set. So that was all stuff that I loved to play with and experiment with as a kid. And then, because I think on Hook Steven really wanted to do that the old school way, my art director and I set it up for him, so we could make it look like Julia was in the doll house, and the doll house was in the foreground, and she was on an oversized set in the background.
But the reality is, it is so cumbersome to take the time to do that in front of camera, and so much faster and easier to use compositing and CG that we did it one time and they said, ‘That’s great, let’s not do that anymore, let’s just go back to the way you want to do it,’ which is using multiple photography elements.
vfxblog: Hook came out in 1991. By the time Indian and the Cupboard came along in 1995, had digital compositing moved on to a point that was even more beneficial for pulling off scale shots?
Eric Brevig: Well, it didn’t necessarily help with scale, because both the large scale and small scale characters were played by actors, so you’re obliged to photograph them both. If you have a small character in a fantasy world or in a CG world, life is much easier. But if you’ve got both characters, large and small scale on screen together in a photorealistic world, you’re obliged to come up with a way to photograph them both so that they both look like they’re in the same environment. And also, for the actors and performers, you have to come up with a way for them to interact and act together.
So a lot of the work on Indian in the Cupboard was to facilitate that kind of emotional relationship that was the core of the movie. It wasn’t a fantasy – well, it was a fantasy, but it wasn’t a spectacular visual effects extravaganza that was showing off, look what we can do. It was an intimate tale of two characters from different worlds and different scales who developed this emotional bond. So it was really important to allow the actor, his name was Litefoot, who played Little Bear, to be able to hear and react to, as an actor, this giant boy. And similarly I had to help the boy, who was played by Hal Scardino, find where to look and so forth and be able to act with the Indian actor so that there was this genuine sense of two people communicating.
vfxblog: I’m curious if going from optical compositing to digital compositing made any difference at all?
Eric Brevig: Well it didn’t really make a big change because essentially we were just replacing the clunky, mechanical, optical printer phase with the equally clunky, primitive digital compositing stage. But it gave me the opportunity to do some fun, nuanced enhancements. I remember there was a shot of, I think it was a cowboy, he’s supposed to be two inches tall and he’s walking across a bed with a comforter on it, and I had a big uneven surface that was blue and shot David Keith, who was playing the cowboy, walking across that.
And my director of photography is a fella named Chuck Shuman, who I worked with on a lot of movies, from Total Recall to The Abyss, and he’s one of the most precise and brilliant directors of photography in understanding how to match the lighting between a small set and an oversized set. And he would actually match the size of the lights, scaled up, when we shot the actors portraying little people, because that’s the way the light wraps around you, is the relationship between the size of the light source and the size of you. And so, when we would shoot the normal set, we would have normal sized lights, whatever size they were, a foot across, and he would rig, for bluescreen miniature people, I think the scale was like 24:1, 24 foot wide illuminated surface that would cast the matching shadows.
In any event, we would shoot these, but there really wasn’t a way to puppeteer how the footsteps would move the fabric because oversized fabric never looked convincing. One of the things that I learned early on was, if you can always shoot the non-miniature stuff on real sets with real cloth, like you would normal macro photograph, it adds a verisimilitude to the scene that you can’t get with oversized props and so forth, which are very difficult to pull off and not have them look a little bit like oversized props.
In any event, as our character walks across this blanket, we were able to digitally put in little divots and depress the cloth wherever his foot stepped, which just sort of locked him in, in a way that you could never had done without digital. Because we’re essentially just warping, or morphing a little bit, some of the background imagery as his foot is making contact. So there were really nice little enhancements like that, as well as just the ability to perfect the compositing edges and so forth, in a way that photo mechanical compositing did not allow us to do.
vfxblog: You mentioned a really cool thing there, which was matching lighting for when a character is shot big and when they’re shot small. What about camera movement, did you use motion control to match up small and large shot plates?
Eric Brevig: I would decide based upon the needs of the shot, which camera – because we had to photograph foregrounds and backgrounds with cameras because they were both real environments – which camera would lead the shot. Let’s say it’s the little boy and he picks up this tiny Indian and he moves across the screen with it in his hand. I would photograph that with a traditional camera, tracking the boy. And he’d have just a little tiny object, I think I used something that looked like a bent paperclip, so that he had something in his hand that was showing him where to put his eye line and kept him honest about how he was holding it, but was easy to paint out.
And then after we had shot that, we would analyse the footage within the duration of the shot that was intended to be used in the movie and we’d say, ‘Okay, here at the beginning we’re one foot away from his hand and six inches above that. Okay, well that’s equal to 24 foot back and 12 feet above.’ And so we would design a camera move, using a very big crane arm, so that we would, as the boy moves through the shot, the camera’s now six inches from the character and one inch above his head, well, that equals 12 feet back and six inches would be six feet above his head.
So, we would basically plot out in the real world what we were doing in terms of matching that camera. And because you have a lot of space for leeway when you’re moving a camera 50 feet through a sound stage, it doesn’t matter if you’re a little bit to the right or the left of where you’re supposed to be, because then by tracking the two and using digital compositing to lock the two together, you’re able to make the perspective of one non-motion control shoot fit the other one by sort of locking them together afterwards.
If instead the shot is driven by what the little characters are doing, well, there was one very nice shot where the camera’s creeping across the little boy’s bedroom, and we can hear the Indian is singing some sort of traditional song. And the camera peers over this toy box that’s in the foreground, and we see that the Indian’s sitting on top of this little half-built structure that’s going to be his home. So what we did is, we figured out the total distance needed at the scale of our adult actor, and it was like a 100 foot camera move, and then we’d come down and we’d peer over where the box would be and then we boomed down, basically into a close-up of him, and we shot that first.
And then by tracking it and using a motion control system to shoot the same move on a bedroom set, we were able to lock them together precisely in photography and really get that sense of no hindrance to the camera wherever it went, because we were shooting on a genuine bedroom sized set, rather than a little bluescreen of the Indian. All the depth of field and focus and all that stuff was exactly as it should be, so it felt like you’re crawling, you know, the camera sort of creeping through this room and peering over a little toy box and there, in shallow depth of field, on this half built house, we’d find the Indian character.
Once again, my director of photography, being aware of what we were doing, would take incredibly precise notes on, for example the bedroom set. Including colour temperature from each of the lights and positioning, and we’d really create that on the giant scale of the screen stage and the two fit together really, really precisely.
https://www.4players.de/4players.php/dispbericht/Allgemein/Test/2916/3074/0/Army_Men_Sarges_War.html
Anyone who thought that after 3DO’s bankruptcy would finally have peace and quiet before further Army Men games was rejoicing too soon. Take 2 seems to have found an almost finished plastic soldier shooter in the bankrupt vulture’s licensing dump, which they now want to sell at a budget price as Army Men: Sarge’s War. You can find out in the test whether it is the usual hazardous waste or a surprisingly good bargain.
It’s hard to believe, but the green and beige armies finally make peace in Sarge’s War and all disputes are put to rest. But the suddenly pacifist toy soldiers have reckoned without the renegade Lord Malice and his henchmen.
Unscrupulous: The renegade Lord Malice has all your plastic comrades on the conscience (PS2).
As soon as the peace treaty is signed, an insidious bomb attack turns the entire party into a lump of plastic. Only Sarge, who returns late from a mission, survives the toy massacre. You can imagine everything else: Sarge wants revenge and doesn’t want to rest until he has hunted down Lord Malice.
To do this, you fight your way through twelve linear levels divided into tiny sections and use a total of eight firearms and grenades to blast everything that stands in your way to a pulp. If you are initially solely dependent on your carbine, which is equipped with unlimited ammunition, you will soon be able to use more interesting calibers such as shotguns, bazookas, heavy machine guns or sniper rifles as the game progresses, with which you can literally tear apart your opponents.
All of the plastic soldiers are extremely tough and sometimes even continue to fight with severed limbs, holes in their bodies or half of their head missing. It’s just a shame that you can’t achieve the same result with a flamethrower as you could with a magnifying glass in the sandbox…
Swiss cheese: With such major gunshot wounds, only a plastic soldier can fight on bravely (Xbox).
But even without plastic warriors melting together, the damage model can be quite impressive and its detailed hit zones will make you grin maliciously – especially if you’re playing against one (PS2) or three (Xbox) friends.
Nevertheless, the multiplayer mode is extremely poor: there are just four maps, no switchable CPU bots and no sensible online use. Xbox users can only play scheduled duels against friends from their Xbox Live contact list, while PS2 owners cannot go online at all. Alternatively, there is also the option of competing against each other via split screen, but since you can see all the opponent’s positions, ambushes or surprise attacks are virtually impossible, which significantly reduces the fun of the game – especially on the PS2, where only duels are possible anyway. On the Xbox you can go into battle with at least four people and also play other modes such as team progression (taking and defending positions) and capture the flag.
by Tim Soete for gamespot.com on May 5, 2000 at 3:56PM PDT
https://gamespot.com/articles/army-men-preview/1100-2563189/
Remember when you were a kid playing with those little dime-a-dozen plastic army figures? You’d set up fortifications on either side of some shrubs or a little patch of dirt and then let the battle between the green and tan unfold. Well, 3DO, with their upcoming and succinctly titled Army Men, will attempt to bring that nostalgic microcosm of a battlefield to life. This action-strategy game is at once challenging and humorous, featuring those little synthetic knick-knacks that you so fondly remember, now fully animated and fighting it out in a real environment.
Army Men is a scrolling, 3-D, top-down perspective strategy game, albeit one that is a great deal more action-oriented than current real-time wargames on the shelf. You begin by choosing a map to set the stage and a commander (they roughly follow a plan of action toward one branch of the armed forces – an Army strategy that concentrates on land attacks, a Navy tendancy towards water assaults, an Air Force aim for air superiority, or a Marine-like attempt to grab land from the water) to pit your guys against. At your home base, you pick a command vehicle that you actually control (personnel and attack helicopter, tank, jeep, or boat), load it with units, and deploy the units in strategic areas. Maps of each battleground are rendered with different terrains of varying traversability. These maps contain separate object layers, so a tank or infantry unit will disappear from view when passing underneath a group of trees or other hovering objects. Units vary in function and size depending on the unit type – heavy or light infantry, grenadiers, or engineers. After deployment, each group of units will get back to you, identifying themselves and delivering status reports. The first side to destroy the opponent’s base – whether it belongs to the computer or a live network player – wins the match. Units are capable of making some decisions on their own, but the player must take a very active role to achieve final victory. “The idea is that if you don’t do anything and put a bunch of units out there, they’ll kind of mill around, perhaps even fight a little, but they won’t do anything serious unless you tell them to,” says David Bunch, Army Men’s director. This idea of constant control of small groups is in direct opposition to the current trend, found in many strategy titles, towards real-time control of large armies.
When you finally do achieve victory, you’re treated to black and white WWII-era propaganda trailers starring computer-generated characters, complete with authentic film scratches and frame-jumps. Graphical details like these really add to the overall humor and believability of the game. For example, the seven death scenes you’ll encounter during battle are consistent with the fact that you’re actually dealing with toy soldiers – so if one of your guys takes a shot, his arm might snap off, or he might melt into a puddle of plastic, a single hand emerging from the remnants. All of the soldiers were designed using 3D Studio MAX with a plug-in called Character Studio that enables the artists to create a framework model of their intended subject and then map realistically moving textures on the finished skeleton. The end result is a phenomenally believable representation of what it might be like if plastic figurines actually came to life.
“I can’t believe that nobody thought of this before,” says Army Men producer Nick Earl. It’s true – other titles such as Close Combat hark back to those days when you sat in the mud and enacted a miniature combat, but Army Men takes the toy soldier idea to its literal extreme. This game, which takes an otherwise static cast of characters and brings them to life, will certainly win over real-time strategy game fans, most of whom began their war-game days setting up battle scenarios with pocket-sized polyurethane troops.
The Army Men franchise has proved to be most profitable for 3DO. The company recently released Army Men: Air Attack, a polygonal 3D top-down shooter similar to the Nuclear Strike series. Now Nintendo 64 owners get their own take on the experience with Army Men: Air Combat. IGN64 recently chatted with project director Kudo Tsunoda about the toy-based shooter.
Kudo Tsunoda: Yes. Air Combat is helicopter combat in the Army Men universe where you fly a little toy helicopter through these giant, oversized worlds. We’re really trying to focus more on the playing with toy aspects of the franchise for the Nintendo 64 version. We’re really playing up that it’s a little plastic toy helicopter so, for example, instead of firing off missiles you’ll be firing off bottle rockets.
Like other Army Men games, it’s the Green Army versus the Tan Army. But we’re also throwing in a lot more neutral environmental enemies so you’ll have bees that swarm out and attack you and mutant bugs that you have to fight against. A lot of the missions are based more on using your helicopter’s winch and interacting with the environments than they are on flying around and blowing things up.
Kudo: There are some parts of the engines that are similar, but obviously for the Nintendo 64 we’re doing a lot more hardware-specific stuff. They’re definitely different systems so you want to max out the potential for each. We rewrote a lot of the code for the Nintendo 64 version, we’re doing new missions and we’re playing up a lot more of the multiplayer stuff. We don’t have a four-player mode for PlayStation, but Nintendo 64 does. So, we’ve really worked on that. Besides the campaign missions, we’ve got cooperative ones. We’ve got four different four-player head-to-head games.
Kudo: It’s doing great. We’ve always got lots of stuff on screen, too. One of the problems about making a game like this is that you can pick up everything in the world [with the helicopter winch] and put it down somewhere. People tend to pick up stuff and build a little encampment with all of the different world objects — pile up all of the soda cans and things like that and then have a huge battle with it all. It’s difficult technology-wise. I mean, it’s great for the gamers, but when I talk to the programmers about what we want to do with the game they look at me like, “I’d like to kill you.”
We did have a lot of time to work on the technology though, so even in multiplayer we still have all of the objects on-screen, everything still looks as good graphically and it all runs at a good speed. So we’re pretty happy with that.
Kudo: Yeah, we will be, mostly for different [presumably high-resolution] graphic modes.
Kudo: Most of the missions are based on using things in the world or capturing toys that you can take into different missions. In Army Men there are the “Our World” missions and the “Their World” missions. The “Our World” is more of playing with toys in these huge environments and the “Their World” is more of the normal scale, military based missions. So, one example is in the “Our World” missions you can go and collect some toy that doesn’t animate. But once you get into the “Their World” missions we tried to keep a lot of the fun of playing with toys alive, so instead of having it straight military based, we’ve added in a giant, for example, a giant toy that walks around and blows up Tan units.
We’ve also got ways of using things in the world to manipulate different insects. So there are bees in the world that you can control by moving flowers around. You pick up a flower, drop it off somewhere else and it’ll attract all of the bees to that area and they’ll help you take out the Tan units.
Kudo: One of the interesting things about making an Army Men title is that it’s such a mass-market license. Because of that it’s hard to make a game that’s going to be fun for a six or seven year old to play as well as advanced players — you know, people our age who played with Army Men as a kid. So we made the helicopter mechanics as simple as possible so that gamers can get into quickly and start flying around shooting stuff. Even a little kid can play, but you still have the added depth of game play like figuring out what every object in the world can do. For example, you can pick up a soda can and then pull the helicopter behind it where it will act as a shield. You can drop it on stuff and squish guys or you can build barricades. You can take a bunch of pinecones and lay them down around an anthill so that the ants are trapped. Then you could remove one pinecone and the ants will drum out in that direction. You can essentially guide where you want the ants to go.
Kudo: Since we don’t have any vertical control, you can just use the analog stick to move the actual helicopter around. After that you’ve got a simple winch mechanic buttons, some strafing buttons — it’s very simple.
Kudo: There is a two-player split-screen cooperative mode. Plus we’ve got four different four-player modes. We’ve got a mode called Flag Nabbit, which is basically Capture the Flag. We’ve got Food Fight where you going around collecting different food items and seeing how you can use them to take your enemy out. We have a bug hunt kind of game where you get points for killing each different type of bug. You can use items in this mode to lure insects your way, where you can kill them all. This mode is pretty cool because you’ve got everybody not only trying to kill the bugs, but also swooping into each other’s areas trying to retrieve various items that will lure the bugs their way. The last mode is Air Rescue, where you go head-to-head trying to rescue little Army Men guys while trying to kill the competition’s guys.
Kudo: We’ve got a backyard environment with a patio and everything. We’ve got a beach area with lots of big sandcastles that you can fly through. We’ve got a park where you can fly up on the Jungle Jim, through a slide and a park-type environment. We’ve also got a campground area with lots of little picnic blankets. We’ve also got military environments like an alpine forest and an Arctic level.
Kudo: In the “Our World” missions we’ve got bottle rockets, Roman candles, different swarm rockets that’ll come out like a four-pack, machine guns and napalm that you can use to melt guys with. But even more, everything in the environment can be used as a weapon. You can pick up the soda can, pinecones — whatever, and drop it on enemies.
Kudo: To me Nuclear Strike is pretty much a straightforward military shooter. The Army Men franchise is based around playing with toys — out in your backyard building a sense of nostalgia of stuff you used to do as a kid. Back at the office we get busted all of the time by security late at night because we’re out in the parking lot lighting Army Men up and firing Roman candles at them. Or when we first started development we had this huge ant farm that we expensed to the company to help develop our “realistic ant AI engine.” But we’d come and take Army Men, dip them in honey, drop them in the ant farm and watch the ants go to town on them. To me, there is only so much of the “Hey, I’m going to go pick up an oil drum and save the POW” missions before it starts to get taxing.
Plus, in Air Combat you can interact with everything in the environment as opposed to the Strike games where you fly around and blow stuff up. Having the depth of game play where it’s not just flying around and shooting stuff, but also learning what you can do with the environment and interacting with it, adds a whole lot.
Kudo: The end of the first-quarter 2000.
3DO: You can pretty much expect that 3DO will be bringing all of its major franchises over to the next-generation of machines. We support Nintendo. They like us.
