#Spyro the dragon fan art full#
But if Spyro seems to have come full circle to find a place in the modern HD gaming landscape, it’s only because it took many bizarre mascot mutations for him to reach this point. Spyro is back, built from the ground-up, in the same year as the ultra-shiny, five-fingered Final Fantasy 7 remake. Reignited i sn’t just a simple return to form for Spyro, but another step in his arc from nineties darling, to dead mascot, to Frankensteined reimagining. Ironically, despite his various renditions, the Reignited Trilogy only makes me realize how far away wobbly, weird 1998 Spyro was. But after the final Spyro game produced by Insomniac in 2000, Spyro underwent a holistic transformation, a literal metamorphosis of brand identity that never stopped. Of course, video game characters change visually over time. I missed the jankiness of the classic Playstation graphics mixed with the weirdness of a skateboarding purple dragon. It felt like someone had covered Spyro in varnish and set him on a shelf in an Apple store. In contrast, when I first saw screens of Reignited Trilogy, I immediately thought of Zangief of Street Fighter fame’s Pixar-quality, cleaned-up expressions in the film Wreck-It Ralph. They were not elegant, or serious, but wacky with strong, simple features. Spyro’s close counterpart, Crash Bandicoot, had even more unhinged expressions. The early Playstation model of Spyro was wildly animated with a limited number of polygons, definitely goofier than any kind of expression a Nintendo character could pull off at the time. This was classic Spyro - he’d have a cockier expression on the 1998 Spyro the Dragon box art for Playstation, but this was the essence of the character. Zembillas’ original sketches depict a wide-eyes, silly-looking creature who brings to mind a coked-up fantasy chihuahua.
Spyro was designed by animator and artist Charles Zembillas, who also did the character designs for The Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog and Captain N. While it’s been nice to catch up with my old dragon friend, I can’t help but feel like something is lost in the Reignited Trilogy - the unrefined weirdness of the original games. And Spyro’s shiny, perfectly-rendered remake has brought up a lot of memories for me, as someone who was there through the franchise’s growing pains.
I was, of course, wrong.īut with the release of the Spyro Reignited Trilogy for the Nintendo Switch, Spyro has dive-bombed straight back into my business. Spyro was my introduction to 3D platformers, and like a beloved childhood toy, I thought he would be in my life forever, untouched by time. Spyro the Dragon - that purple teenager with attitude who happens to breathe fire - is the epitome of an era in which big-eyed mascot characters ruled video games.
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