Fire up any recent game and if it features water in any capacity, chances are good that it’ll look suitably refreshing. While actual fluid simulation remains computationally expensive, the visual representation of water has continued to evolve and impress for years. It’s fair to say that water looks great in most game today but if you dive back into the early days of gaming, water is one of those things that has always been difficult to get right. In this DF Retro special – with more titles examined in-depth in the embedded videos on this page – I take a look at the standout water implementations across 15 years of classic gaming.
Now, something to keep in mind as we progress through the annals of virtual water is that there are basically three elements which make up the display of water in games. There’s the visual element of the water surface including the animation and reflection of light, there are the wave patterns and finally, there’s the rendering of underwater segments. Some games focus on just one while others attempt to simulate all aspects of water. Most older retro games typically focus on just one element.
Back in the 2D era, effectiveness of water rendering would vary from game to game, but the fundamental concept was based on the same technique: hardware registers would be manipulated during the frame refresh to change colours, effectively cutting the screen into two – above water and below. Beyond that, fascinating tricks were used to add authenticity to the effect. This scanline trick is used in Vice Project Doom – a late NES release, where reflections, ripples and indeed, the entire parallax background effect are displayed using mid-frame register writes.
Source: Eurogamer DF Retro: The history of water rendering in classic games