I started out my design career as an artist  in 1995 for a video game company called Readysoft Inc.  The company was headed up by David Foster (no, not the musician), and had purchased the rights to an arcade classic called Dragon’s Lair. It was the first animated video game which was a huge hit in the early arcade scene. The game looked much like a cartoon (Illustrated by Don Bluth) in which you controlled the actions of the hero, Dirk the Daring. The original arcade version was stored on laser disc (the predecessor to CDs) which was hidden inside the arcade machine.
Readysoft took the original laser disc and converted it so that it could be played on the PC via CD-Rom. One of the problems with doing this was that “graphic artefacts” were left behind on each converted frame. This unwanted junk needed to be cleaned up for all the frames going into the game; and there were thousands of them.
Initially, I worked for Readysoft as a “Graphic Clean-Up Artist” where I was apart of a team responsible for cleaning up the individual frames that were to go into the PC version of the game.  Dragon’s Lair was a huge success for Readysoft and the company eventually released Dragon’s Lair 2,  Space Ace (another animated Don Bluth game), and Space Ace 2.

After some time, Readysoft took on the venture of creating their own animated game from scratch. A team of animators under the direction of David Quesnelle were hired to work on this new game, which would later be known as Brain Dead 13. It was during this time that the graphic clean-up department I worked in became dismantled and all focus went on the development of the new game. A friend of mine, Shawn Pascuttini,  who worked with me in the department was also attending the animation courses at Sheridan College.  Shawn became one of the animators who worked on Brain Dead 13.  Though I worked in the graphic clean-up department, I had no formal training in art or design at the time. However, since I was pretty handy with computers and an opening came up in the Technical Supported department, I was moved there and kept my job at Readysoft.

A studio for the animators was set up at the Readysoft building and production of Brain Dead 13 began. Anyone who’s ever worked in animation will understand how time consuming a project like this can be. The entire department spent months developing and sketching the characters, painting background scenes, and scanning artwork frame-by-frame into the computer; which by the way were Amigas back then. The deadline for the release of the game was approaching fast and a lot overtime hours were already clocked. There was still a lot of frames that needed to be Cell-Painted and Mr. Quesnelle approached me for help. I spent many all-nighters painting frames for the game so we could meet our deadline. One of the coolest things I got to do on the project was painting the dramatic end scene in the game and my name shows up in the credits which is super cool!

In the end, the game did fairly well and for a short time I got to be apart of an animation team. When the project was over, the studio and department were dismantled and most of the animators, including my friend, went to Disney. That however wasn’t the end of Readysoft, or me for that matter.

Stay tuned for my next post on where Readysoft and I went after Braindead 13!

-Shawn Woytowich
Toronto Artist / Designer

A cleaned frame from the game Dragon`s Lair

A cleaned frame from the game Space Ace

A scene from Braindead 13

Here`s a YouTube video that someone put up that showcases some of the animation in Brain Dead 13.