#Spyro: Year of The Dragon

[playstationpark]

'Spyro: Year of the Dragon' was released on the PlayStation 24 years ago today in the US. Support us on Patreon

[auntiealiasing]

The kind of animation wobble you see in the PS1 Spyros isn't a PS1 limitation, but an artifact of animation being done without a skeleton. Gamedevs at the time animated models by manually dragging their vertices around.

Quake 1 and 2 have this issue too!

[fyeahspyroandcrash]

[mast3r-rainb0w]

Spyro Year of the Dragon - Happy 24th Anniversary! by Mast3r-Rainb0w

Happy 24th Anniversary to Spyro: Year of the Dragon (a.k.a. Spyro 3), which released back in 2000, and ever so fittingly on the Chinese Lunar New Year of the Dragon! Here's some fanart of gaming's greatest purple dragon riding his radical skateboard with a traditional Chinese-theme for the background! Enjoy!

[breezeharbour]

I have a question you may be able to answer, regarding how things are animated in the Spyro games. Are characters rigged on a skeleton, or are they animated "by hand"? I've been thinking about this for a while now before I found your blog. The inner machinations of Spyro fascinate me.

if you're talking about the original trilogy: as seen in this video on insomniac's dev process on spyro 3, the animators worked with basic armatures to create the character animations. so no the animators didnt have to like... select and move each vertex of the models individually on their axes if that's what you mean by 'by hand' ; they did have skeletons to simplify the process!

unlike modern games though, those skeletons aren't present in the game itself/deforming the models in real time. all traces of the rig are discarded and we're viewing the vertex animation only

the way i might best explain it, after an armature animation is finished by the artist in the animation software, the transformations for all of the model's vertices are recorded for each frame. those recorded sequences make up animation data that is associated with the moby (insomniac's internal word for movable object/instance). each frame of animation you see is just the moby referencing that data to tell each of its vertices where to go next in 3D space. i hope that makes sense

[crabsinvideogames]

Spyro: Year of the Dragon

Hermit crabs can be found as the fodder in Lost Fleet, where giant crabs can also be found.

[juniepops]

It's another beautiful Monday for a Spyro stream and we've made it to our personal favorite of the classic trilogy, Spyro: Year of the Dragon! With a greater number of levels, puzzles, and even playable characters, it's overall a bigger and more complex game than the previous two. Come to twitch.tv/juniepops and hang out with us at 3PM ET / 12PM PT while we start on this adventure and meet some friends old and new!

[mdbjc]

[rikkita]

[wollf-san]

I had to, it was the only of the original trilogy I played.

Happy New Year

[playstationgamemania]

PS1 games played - 2022

[playstationpark]

Ninja Vanish 'Spyro: Year Of The Dragon' PlayStation

[hwd405]

Spyro 3 - The GameSpot Build and Lost Media

I've been actively researching and documenting early builds of Spyro 3 for something like 7 or 8 years now, and while I feel like I've made a significant impact, there's always going to be people that have never seen any the content that I've helped to document - so, every now and then, I get the urge to infodump about one piece of my research to a new group of people, to help make sure that the documentation I've done isn't only known to a very small group of people... that'd defeat the purpose of documentation, to an extent, I think.

Sometimes, outreach ends up being extremely important to the research and preservation of prerelease content - and this is no better exemplified than with Spyro 3's "GameSpot build".

On June 23rd, 2000, several websites and publications revealed early previews of Spyro: Year of the Dragon - this date was probably some sort of online embargo date.

The "April preview", an early build which seems to match the one used at E3 2000, was used by most of these publications. A few of them, according to accounts from those that wrote the previews, received exclusive gameplay sessions from the likes of Mark Cerny - these previews apparently took place quite close to the embargo date and certainly would have used a later build than the April one. We know that IGN received one of these sessions (but, according to the author of the preview article, was allegedly unable to record gameplay during this session, which resulted in IGN having to use the same build everyone else did in their preview articles), and it's a pretty safe bet that GameSpot did, too. In GameSpot's case, we actually got to see what this build looked like:

As expected, it's a later build than the April prototype - this one seems to be from around the same point in development as the earliest demo disc version, though we're not sure if it's an earlier build or a later one. Three main characteristics stick out in these screenshots:

We don't ever see what the eggs looked like in this build, but the fragments use this bizarre ornate gold texture.

The HUD uses a green egg sprite similar to some of the eggs seen in the April build; the earliest demo disc version also uses this sprite.

For some reason, transparent polygons are a solid black colour, making some screenshots look sort of ominous and weird.

Perhaps the weirdest thing about this build is that the gold egg fragments it uses, which to most players would be completely unrecognisable and unlike anything they've ever seen before, actually do appear in the final game. And they hatch from every egg in the entire game. In most cases, the fragment flies off screen before the player can spot it.

The earliest demo build, which seems to be from around May 25th, 2000, does not include this texture at all, which has called into question the timeline placement of the GameSpot build. On one hand, they might've used the final egg texture momentarily, switched to the gold one, and switched back, accidentally leaving one of the textures intact. On the other hand, there have been cases in many Spyro builds of random early assets weeding their way back into the game via means that we don't really understand. Look no further than the August 27th, 1998 localisation prototype of Spyro the Dragon, a post-final build which inexplicably re-uses an early Gnasty Gnorc model, textures, and animations, from around 2 months earlier in development:

The info we have on this build doesn't just stop at screenshots, though! GameSpot kindly uploaded 5 videos of the build - labelled "Movie 2" through "Movie 6" (thanks GameSpot. that's not confusing at all) - to their website. Most of these videos were later temporarily put behind a paywall, and in 2014, 4 of these videos were deleted during a server move, with only Movie 2 (the one never put behind a paywall) remaining. The one movie that remained didn't even play properly in GameSpot's video player for years, so I had to download the video from the API to view it at all:

While the video is an important piece of history, and did reveal to us that the early Sgt. Byrd theme heard in some old IGN videos of the April preview had a previously unheard guitar section (this was prior to the public release of the April preview), it doesn't tell us very much new about the build. If we really wanted to more precisely date the build, we'd need to know what the eggs looked or sounded like - but the egg collection section was entirely cut from the video. As of yet, we just don't have this information.

As for Movies 3 - 6? These are now lost media. They were up on the site for 14 years, we know that people saw them, and I suspect there were people that downloaded them. However, since they were deleted nearly 10 years ago, nobody has come forward to say that they have one of the videos and to show what was in it. Anyone that does come forward with this info should be met with some scepticism, of course, but I think the only way we'll ever see more of this build is with a greater outreach and more widespread knowledge of the missing videos - the videos were readily downloadable from the website, and so someone still has the videos, I'm sure.

And before anyone asks, yes, the WayBack Machine has been very extensively searched for these videos - we can't find them, there's just no trace of them on there.

Judging by the video descriptions, Movie 3 would have focused on Bentley, Movie 4 on either Sheila or Agent 9, and Movies 5 and 6 on Spyro gameplay.

I've only ever encountered one person who claims to have seen these videos, and whether they're to be believed or not, they claimed that one of the videos showed Sunny Villa using Fireworks Factory's theme (levels using the wrong themes was very common in early builds of these games! Additionally, Fireworks Factory's theme is very likely to have been present around this point in development), and another showed Agent 9 gameplay using a track that didn't sound very Spyro-like, but more like "something from James Bond".

When the April preview released later on, it was discovered that early Spyro 3 builds actually do have a number of entirely non-Spyro themes, all by µ-Ziq and Propellerheads, left unused in their soundtrack data. The tracks in these builds seem to line up with the levels present in an earlier build of the game, and by this metric, it seems that "Spybreak!", a theme from the Matrix soundtrack, would have (fittingly?) lined up with Agent 9's Lab, and possibly would have been used in that level in internal development builds. Sure enough, my contact agreed that this was the theme they heard, when I sent them the track - if this is indeed the case, then this build is very very weird indeed.

It remains to be seen whether we'll ever learn anything new about this build, but we can only hope. I've linked to an archived 7z file containing all the screenshots uploaded to GameSpot below, as well as a link to a TCRF article detailing some of the known differences spotted in this build:

Archive.org

TCRF

[fyeahspyroandcrash]

[thepowerposter]

Complete Monstober II Day 13: The Sorceress

In its heyday, the Spyro franchise churned out this horrifying mass murderer! Here's her TV Tropes entry:

The Sorceress is the cruel ruler of the Forgotten Worlds. Manipulating her apprentice Bianca into abducting 150 Dragon Eggs under the guise of restoring magic to her kingdom, the Sorceress reveals the true depths of her selfishness and hypocrisy, with her true intentions being to collect the dragon hatchlings' wings for a spell to gain immortality — nonchalantly stating that she doesn't even have to kill them; she just doesn't want them wriggling around while she removes their wings. Completely uncaring of the lives of her men, the Sorceress transforms her own minions into freakish monsters to fight Spyro, and ultimately, due to her annoyance of Spyro's interference, creates a "monster to end all monsters" to wipe out every dragon. A genocidal tyrant who only cares about herself, the Sorceress stands out as the darkest and purest villain in the original Spyro trilogy.

[crabsinvideogames]

Spyro: Year of the Dragon

Giant crabs can be found in multiple realms in this game, but appear as a small enemy in the Lost Fleet realm. They can also be found in the Crawdad Farm, can be summoned by Scorch, and blue crabs appear on the race track in the Super Bonus Round.

Giant crabs also appear in Spyro 2: Ripto's Rage.