BATTLE AXE

“These days there’s not many veteran pixel artists around, especially those that worked on the Mega Drive”
MIKE TUCKER

It’s fair to say that there’s still a love and appreciation of pixel art in contemporary games, many which are rightly considered classics. However, most of these are from developers emulating the 8-bit and 16-bit games they grew up with. What we don’t get as much are works from pixel artists from those eras still active and committed to that aesthetic.

Henk Nieborg is one such veteran, with a career spanning decades from the Amiga to the Mega Drive. After dabbling in 3D graphics, working on titles like Harry Potter And The Chamber Of Secrets and Spyro: A Hero’s Tail, he was fed up with working in huge teams and went freelance, where his 2D talents could still contribute to mobile and handheld titles.

While those years led to dozens more credits, including , and , these were often as small contributions. Henk was pining for a project he could call his own, not done since on PlayStation in 1996., originally known as , began to take shape, as a 16-bit fantasy arcade brawler, harking back to , and Capcom’s arcade titles from the Nineties. Fortunately, the prototypes got the attention of Bitmap Bureau’s design director and programmer Mike Tucker, who had his own idea for a 16-bit game, Mega Drive arena shooter .