In 2014, former Taito graphic designer Atsushi Iwata posted a picture of the device he used to create pixel graphics. This custom joystick was connected to a X68000, a computer which was used as a workstation by many Japanese video game companies until the mid-90s (although companies such as Sega and Westone used a PC-98 to develop some, if not all, of their games during this era).

There is one button per function hence the 20 buttons featured on the control panel. The software used by Taito was called Taito Animator.



While it seems odd to use such a device, it wasn’t that uncommon. Hayato Takano (past works unknown) recently posted a picture of a similar device and added that some developers were still using the X68000 version of this device until 1998 (Windows 95 pretty much became the standard OS in the late 90s and Japan was no exception).

A Windows compatible version was made as well as a PC-98 version.



A few years ago, Spoon, a member of The Madman’s Cafe, posted a message in which he recounted a story one of his co-worker told him:

“The sprite editor used by artists for a number of SNK fighting games (Art Box) was written for the Neo-Geo, and uses the Neo-Geo as the interface. As in, you would use the joystick and the buttons to draw the sprite. He didn’t believe this when he started there, until one of the higher ups showed him by firing up one of the machines and drawing a kickass sprite of Robert Garcia in like 10 minutes”.

I don’t know why some companies decided to use a joystick to draw. It was probably faster than a mouse and less costly than a digital pen, but, as you may guess, it was pretty noisy.





On a related note, another developer (Tonya_Plan) posted a picture of a keyboard used to create graphics (circa 1992).



Sources:

https://twitter.com/Tonya_Plan/status/758257142109392897

http://www.mmcafe.com/cgi-bin/forums/bbs/messages/13519.shtml#70395

https://twitter.com/gantan/status/449437866406330368

https://twitter.com/Takano_Hayato/status/859226948240683008

https://twitter.com/Takano_Hayato/status/859300262455918592

https://twitter.com/Takano_Hayato/status/859229323055710209

https://twitter.com/sirap_461/status/865787141653053440

https://twitter.com/Zerochan/status/859301646756491264

https://twitter.com/mutyasensei/status/449730507639508993

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost.php?p=208105584&postcount=136

