The very first HD videogame was from 1993 - Rare footage

[parallaxscroll]

Hi-Ten Bomberman -- "Hi" for High Definition, "Ten" for ten players. Created in 1993 for Japan's widescreen HDTV format called HD-Vision, came more than a decade before Xbox 360 came out. Hi-Ten Bomberman was the ancestor of Saturn Bomberman, but to me Hi-Ten looks better. Hi-Ten Bomberman ran on a custom NEC PC which ran the game and two PC Engine CoreGrafx consoles for inputs. The HDTV display was probably a plasma set costing more than $10,000.




Overview
Hi-TEN Bomberman was the world's first HD-TV video game and was used by Hudson Soft to demonstrate their HD-TV technology. The first version demoed at the 1993 Hudson Soft "Super Caravan" as part of a Bomberman competition and ran using two PC Engine CoreGrafx (5 players on each machine) and a computer to output to the HD-TV. For the 1994 contest, the game was apparently updated to run on a Project Tetsujin "IronMan" prototype board, which many believe eventually became the PC-FX. This version of Bomberman featured up to 10 players and purportedly included Bonk, though this has not been confirmed. Hi-TEN Bomberman was later ported to the Sega Saturn under the name Saturn Bomberman, and Saturn Bomberman does feature Bonk, so it is likely that Hi-Ten also featured Bonk. In 1993, Hi-TEN Bomberman was given the Committee Chairman's Award at the "High Vision Awards 93" hosted by the Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications. Many believe that the game was never released on the PC-FX due to NEC's strict content guidelines on the system, though it was eventually ported to the Sega Saturn.

http://bonkzonk.com/game.ktn?Game=htbm#ss




Hi-Ten Bomberman
Developed by Hudson Soft - Action - Unreleased

Hi-Ten Bomberman was a game that was originally planned to be released on the PC-FX, however due to NEC's publishing guidelines, Hi-Ten would never be released for the unit. The game in its original form would never be for sale, but it did however make an appearance in the Hudson Soft Gaming Caravan back in 1993 as part of a competition. Hi-Ten Bomberman was a 10 player version of the popular PC Engine/TG-16 game "Bomberman", and was formatted for play on wide-screen HDTV's - the first game ever for the HDTV standard (at the time, HDTV's have been in Japan for many years). You could play as many different characters like "Bonk" or "Bomberman" (Woman or Man) and many more. It is believed that Hudson Soft later released this version, redone slightly, as "Saturn Bomberman", which includes the PC-FX "widescreen" 10-player mode. Saturn Bomberman is basically what the PC-FX version should have been like.

http://www.pcenginefx.com/PC-FX/html/pc-fx_world_-_f_r_-_hi-ten_bom.html




Here are some screenshots and rare footage.

http://www.pcenginefx.com/PC-FX/assets/images/facts_rumors_htb_01.jpg
http://www.pcenginefx.com/PC-FX/assets/images/facts_rumors_htb_02.jpg
http://www.pcenginefx.com/PC-FX/assets/images/facts_rumors_htb_03.jpg
http://www.pcenginefx.com/PC-FX/assets/images/facts_rumors_htb_04.jpg
http://www.pcenginefx.com/PC-FX/assets/images/facts_rumors_htb_05.jpg

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ijWXi-vUzrM

[RCM]

I've seen this before. What about PC or arcade titles of the time or before it? Couldn't some of those be considered HD or ED?

[parallaxscroll]

I've seen this before. What about PC or arcade titles of the time or before it? Couldn't some of those be considered HD or ED?

arcade games went HD after Xbox 360. Im sure there are many PC games that were ED and/or HD before that, though.

[j_factor]

ED yes (VGA), but not HD. Wikipedia says XGA was introduced in 1990 but it was a long time after that that games supported it. Whether XGA should even be considered HD is debatable but it's close enough. Even the Voodoo2 (1998), IIRC, only supported SVGA (800x600).

[Kiddo]

On NicoNicoDouga there was another upload of that video, which didn't have the AssemblerEX watermark.

I mirrored it up on English NicoNico.

http://video.niconico.com/watch/sm481030

[parallaxscroll]

On NicoNicoDouga there was another upload of that video, which didn't have the AssemblerEX watermark.

I mirrored it up on English NicoNico.

http://video.niconico.com/watch/sm481030


Thanks ^__^

[DCMasterCaster]

This is really cool!

[kedawa]

What is the actual resolution of the game?
I doubt it's anywhere close to 720p.

[parallaxscroll]

What is the actual resolution of the game?
I doubt it's anywhere close to 720p.

Honestly I don't know. I'm sure it wasn't 720p. It was designed for Japan's Hi-Vision HDTV system at the time. It was widescreen and higher resolution than any other videogame at the time. I''ll try to do some research on it, but I doubt I'll find more than what I have.

[RCM]

Honestly I don't know. I'm sure it wasn't 720p. It was designed for Japan's Hi-Vision HDTV system at the time. It was widescreen and higher resolution than any other videogame at the time. I''ll try to do some research on it, but I doubt I'll find more than what I have.

Why not shoot an inquiry to Hudson/Konami, or to someone who worked there at the time?

[j_factor]

Actually Hi-Vision was 1035i. It was supported by satellite TV and a small number of laserdiscs (requiring a Hi-Vision LD player).

[ccovell]

The Japanese Hi-Vision standard was 1125 interlaced scanlines.

Simply counting the # of blocks on the Bomberman screen, assuming they are 16x16 pixels, puts the screen resolution at around 624 x 448, noninterlaced probably.

[buzz_n64]

I know at some expos they have 2160p and above, not commercially available of course, but I wonder if there are any games developed for resolutions beyond 1080p currently.

[j_factor]

The Japanese Hi-Vision standard was 1125 interlaced scanlines.

That's with overscan. It's 1035 active scanlines. It was still analog.


I know at some expos they have 2160p and above, not commercially available of course, but I wonder if there are any games developed for resolutions beyond 1080p currently.

Some PC games support 1920x1200, and possibly higher than that.

[parallaxscroll]

here's a little jem of a post:

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost.php?p=2242730&postcount=4



I played Hi-ten Bomberman (it was running on a PC) at Hudson HQ in Sapporo about ten years ago. It was fucking amazing. There were like, separate mini-battles going on between groups of two or three players. It was chaos and terror all the way.
It would be PERFECT for play on 360 Live Arcade.


There were definitely lots of stages. The game had been properly tested and bug checked. It was very polished, lots of power ups and a couple of things that were (at that time) new to the series.
I am emailing someone about it right now.


And to reiterate, it was running on a PC, which means somewhere, someone has it. The motherlode.

[parallaxscroll]

Saw this on GAF


Brandon Sheffield's Gamasutra interview with Takahashi-Meijin has some interesting parts regarding PCFX:

(...)

That makes sense. With the HD Bomberman [Hi-Ten Bomberman] that was playable in one of these Caravan events, it was really kind of groundbreaking, because there wasn't any real HD technology at that time, and also it was 10-player. Can you go a little bit into the origin of that?

TM: Back then in Japan, there was a national TV company called NHK. They were trying to push HDTV, so with that overall flow, Hudson was thinking, "Okay, if TV gets that good, the program itself needs to be that good as well."

Also, the screen ratio was going to be 16:9, so that's why 10-player was possible, because you have more characters lined up versus 4:3. They didn't have the graphic board to support that back then, so they had to manually put one together one.

And that became the Iron Man board, correct?

TM: Tetsujin, yeah. It was only used internally. How could you know all this? (laughter)

Just to clarify because some people have been confused, even though Hi-Ten Bomberman was created on the Tetsujin board, it was never intended for PC-FX, correct? Even though the PC-FX was based on the Tetsujin board.

TM: The PC-FX was based on the Tetsujin board but it wasn't quite the same. The graphics weren't in HD because we didn't use the HD graphics board. The FX was not in our vision when we first developed that game. We developed it simply for use in HD.

What was the aim of the PC-FX console? It seems to me that NEC had very specific ideas about what kind of games could be on it, because there were only gal-get (visual novel/dating sim) titles and other similar games on it for quite some time. Can you talk some about the genesis of the project between NEC and Hudson?

TM: Their goal was to create a game with everything on the screen moving, rather than playing a basically still action game with just the characters moving around. The CPU ability back then was not that good. We did research into how to make graphics that were more motion-oriented, so FX was the answer.

Did NEC have specific types of genres that it wanted on there? It seemed like it was very much going in the full-motion video direction, rather than proper games like the PC Engine had, and it was a lot of dating sims and things like that. Was that done purposefully, or was that just who ended up developing for it?

TM: NEC didn't do anything to set the genre direction that the software was made in. Their concern was purely technical. Software-wise, Hudson was the one thinking about that and setting the direction. When you're talking about "NEC", there's a distinction. NEC Home Electronics itself just worked on the hardware. The software division that worked on games was known as NEC Avenue. When you're talking about NEC, the hardware and software divisions have to be understood.

So why did Hudson decide to go for FMV-type stuff in that era, after other consoles had already failed at doing that?

TM: I really think it's because we wanted to see how far we could go to challenge that.

There weren't very many titles released throughout the system's lifetime, and only toward the end did actual action games start to come to the console. What was the thinking within Hudson at the time this transition was happening?

We're talking between '95 and '96. Hudson was already doing stuff on the Saturn and PlayStation, but it still had its own system, which was very much not succeeding -- I'm talking about the PC-FX. The PC Engine was still doing okay.

TM: The PC Engine was 16-bit. At the time the PlayStation came out, suddenly CG and 3D polygon graphics could be used. Sega and Sony had come out with products at around the same level, and NEC wasn't doing very well, and was ready to withdraw, because the console wasn't strong enough, so that was their turning point as well. Because that was the era of console change.

Yeah. I was just wondering about the targeting of that console. It seemed to not be focusing on actual action games anymore, which the PC Engine was, but the FX was not. Specifically, I'm wondering why they chose this different direction.

TM: At the beginning of the PC Engine era, we wanted to show what the PC Engine could do, like large characters in China Warrior, rather than a little Mario jumping around. That was very surprising at the start. During the FX era, we wanted to show even smoother and more beautiful characters, which could move better, which could not be done in the PC Engine era.

Overall, action games were losing popularity and the shooting games had really fallen down. RPGs, with a lot of story content, were on the rise. That's why Hudson, as a software development house, just followed the trend.

It's pretty much all about business. At the time when PlayStation came out with Final Fantasy, it became that some genres just didn't sell. There was nothing to be done about that. For people who grew up in the shooting and action game era, when they saw Final Fantasy and its excellent graphics, they said "Role playing games are amazing!"

The popularity started to take off from there. As they get older, they couldn't move as fast as before, but an RPG, no matter how old you are, you still can finish the game. The whole thing was shifting that way. People were concentrating on those games. That's why the direction was changing.

Think of it like a pyramid. The top of the pyramid is the core gamers, and the rest is the casual gamers. Look at the shooting game era. The core gamers want better graphics, better performance, and better everything, so those developers are looking at these people and ignoring the larger, casual gamers. I think that's probably why we then realized that those things were not really getting more popular anymore, because it's just a small group of people, so they had to make a shift.

Just one more quick question about the FX. Do you remember, or can you say what all the expansion ports were supposed to be used for? They were never used. The one on the bottom, and the one in the back.

TM: Those were expansion interface ports. The ports all over it -- they didn't end up having any function. The FX hardware just didn't sell well, and we had to give up on producing it. I'm not 100 percent sure, but I think they may have been planning to add some peripherals later on, so they kept the ports, but the console ended up not selling very well, so nothing was really developed.

I think it's safe to say that it was probably an early version of USB or a FireWire type of thing. They could have been used for a recorder, remote control, keyboard, or music hardware.

It had to be more than that, because these ports took up a lot of space in the console.

TM: I don't know! (laughs)[/b]/


[B]Full interview (http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/3801/the_game_master_speaks_hudsons_.php?print=1)

[Duke.Togo]

I was at the 1992 Summer Consumer Electronics Show in Chicago during their experiment with the public day. I remember going through several booths that featured high definition displays, including one that had a large theater. These were not commercially available, but I am guessing just to show buyers where the tech was going. I don't recall seeing any games displayed, just some sample footage. Cool stuff.