There was a while as a teenager, where I was completely Otaku. Or at least as Otaku as you could be, when you don’t have any form of cash-flow. I bought what VHS releases I could (the first being Dominion Tank Police and Project A-ko) and was an avid reader of Manga Magazine.
But where did it start? It’s a bit odd, but I don’t think any of us who were kids in 80′s and 90′s realised that we had already been sort of brainwashed into liking Anime. We were flooded with Japanese produced or influenced cartoons such as Ulysses 31 and Battle Of The Planets and so, the Western offerings quite often seemed rather tame and uninteresting in comparison.
But we didn’t really “get” what we were being introduced to.
Then there was a period of time in my mid-teens where the pressures of being constantly bullied at school and where home life was rather bleak, where I guess I was really suseptable to anything that would take my mind off the crapness that was my every day life. So when I read an article in a news paper detailing Manga Entertainment’s plan to release Japanese series’ (particularly OVA) in the UK on video and describing the Japanese affinity for Anime and Manga, it had grabbed my interest.
And then after watching Laputa: Castle In The Sky a day or two before New Years Eve in 1990, I was hooked.
Here was something that I could loose myself in. Where I could imagine my own part in all these wonderful sci-fi adventures, and didn’t have to be the kid bullied at school or worry about life at home for short periods of time.
In a way it saved me, and I became more and more Otaku. This was especially true when I started college in 1993, where my clothing choice was usually scruffy jeans with equally scruffy trainers. And let’s not forget my scruffy kahki jacket, too.
I developed a few favorites in this period. Most notably, Dominion Tank Police, Appleseed (image right), Akira and a few others. But as I got a bit older, and as my life suddenly found a form of balance, I started to loose interest.
As I said before, I started college in 1993. I had a girlfriend, I was no longer bullied and I seemed to have found something that I was really good at; programming. It wasn’t so much that I didn’t have time to wath Anime or read Manga; I just started to realise that alot of it was pretty much the same; scantily clad school girls with big Mech’s and variations on that theme. Of course, what I didn’t really understand was that there was much more on offer; it’s just that what I was being offered was limited by Manga Entertainments marketing stragetgy; which was to appleal to lonely, 14-17 year old males in order to build up an initial customer base.
So as I turned 18, I read less and less, and watched less and less. I only took the occasional interest, something that appeared a bit more out-of-the-ordinary and secretly pined that Laputa had not been shown on TV or released on video since that first viewing.
(It’s worth pointing out that I do now own a copy of Laputa on DVD)
In some ways, I guess my tastes became a bit more refined. I still had an active like in Anime and Manga, it’s just that I didn’t ingest everything that was offered.
But for a while, I was one of the original Otaku in the 90′s. Only with better personal hygene than most.
The title says it all. I’ve implemented the tool that packs geometry, material and texture data together into a single binary for levels. I’ve also gotten rendering working, which involved writing a script object to instantiate the level. But there’s no scene partitioning. This means that the visibility code is currently checking EVERY sub-mesh in the level geometry against the camera frustum.
