Game Freak’s latest illustration video with illustrator Ken Sugimori reveals more about the development of the company’s first published game, Quinty (released as Mendel Palace in US, published by Hudson).
Although Quinty is the titular character in the Japanese version, she is actually the villain responsible for the kidnapping of her sister, Jenny. She did so because she was jealous of the attention that Jenny always got. In the North American version, while Quinty still appears, she is never officially named, as the story is about a princess named Candy who gets stuck in her own dream world and needs to be saved.
Here is what Sugimori has to say about Quinty:
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- Sugimori’s first project at Game Freak was for Quinty. The original sprites for Quinty were drawn on graph paper.
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- It was Sugimori and another designer who were in charge of designing the characters and the pixel art for Quinty.
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- Characters back then were designed mostly by sprite then turned into illustrations for box art and game manual art. Furthermore, not all the official art was done by the game company – places like arcades would hire professional illustrators for their own art for the games.
Here’s a comparison between the original game manual art for Quinty and Sugimori’s illustration for the video:
Finally, here’s the entire illustration process in the video below:
You can check out Game Freak’s previous videos on HarmoKnight and Drill Dozer on our previous article here.
Quinty released on the Nintendo Famicom in Japan in 1989, and released in North America in 1990 on the NES as Mendel Palace.
