[mewse]

I suspect a lot of people 'invented' the effect at approximately the same time. Honestly, the Dreamcast was the first piece of hardware really capable of doing the effect to a high level of quality in real-time.

I developed the cel shading effect for the Dreamcast game 'Looney Tunes: Space Race' (developed by Infogrames Melbourne House) literally during the first week we had access to a Dreamcast development kit. Infogrames Sheffield (devs of Wacky Racers) were shown an early version of our implementation, and added the similar effect to their game. It looked great, but went into their game pretty late in production, so the game hadn't really been optimised for it the way that ours was.

And the folks behind Jet Grind Radio came up with the effect on their own as well, and beat both of us to market. They were using exactly the same algorithm, but were using it in a very different way; they were fully embracing and leaning into the uneven, wide and jagged outlines, where Sheffield and we were fighting against them and trying to match a more uniform and traditional art style.

And then only about a year later, somebody seemed to have figured out how to make the edge-detection cel shading approach work in real-time on Xbox, for the game "Dragons Lair 3D". I had done a test implementation of that approach on the Dreamcast, but it wasn't nearly performant enough for us to run it on multiple characters at once while playing a game too! Not sure whether it was due to the Xbox being more powerful or them just having a smarter algorithm than mine, but you can't argue with their results! If you're making a game that you want to look like an actual hand-drawn cartoon, that is still absolutely the best quality way to do it, IMHO.

Someday I'll find an excuse to try my hand at implementing one of those again. Performance shouldn't be a problem at all any more, I imagine!

[AuryGlenz]

For a game I haven't thought about in nearly 25 years, I want you to know I instantly remembered how Looney Tunes: Space Race looked.

[hnlmorg]

Thanks for sharing that. It was a great read.