THE MAKING OF Fantavision

WHEN YOU'RE LOOKING TO DAZZLE A CROWD, PUTTING ON A FIREWORKS DISPLAY IS A GOOD WAY TO DO IT - AND THAT'S EXACTLY HOW SONY CHOSE TO SHOW OFF THE POWER OF THE PS2. KATSUYUKI KANETAKA REVEALS HOW THE CULT CLASSIC PYROTECHNIC PUZZLE GAME WAS MADE

- NICK THORPE

If there’s one thing players expect when a new console launches, it’s a spectacular first-party game to really show off what the technology can do. In the late-Nineties, Nintendo used Super Mario 64 as an ample demonstration of the impressive 3D worlds that the N64 could host and Sega highlighted the ever-decreasing gap between home console and arcade graphics with Virtua Fighter 3tb. With the PlayStation 2 being perhaps the most anticipated console launch of all time, you’d naturally expect Sony to bring out the big guns to justify the hype. Instead, it chose to lead with a quirky puzzle game based around fireworks.

For game director Katsuyuki Kanetaka, Fantavision was the realisation of an idea he’d first had as a student in the 16-bit days. “Between the time I was making CG animations with a computer called the Amiga when I was a student and when I started to get involved in game development, I thought that fireworks could be expressed in CG, and if this was possible, I thought that applying it to game screens would surely produce attractive visuals!” The choice of fireworks had nostalgic value too. “I also loved the game screens of videogames from the Seventies to the early Eighties, where only the characters were displayed on a pitch-black background,” says Kanetaka. “I thought that a game with fireworks as its motif would allow me to create another game with such a screen.”

This was an idea that Kanetaka had held onto for years. Before working at Sony Computer Entertainment, he’d been a game designer at Capcom and the company’s strengths in 2D arcade games naturally influenced the way