How did indie animators distribute computer generated content in the early 90s?

[VirusDumb]

So I found about this Eric Schwartz guy and this animation is from 1995, but I also found one from 1993, which I feel is a bit too nsfw to share here, but I wanted to know is how did these things spread? Like last time I read about this era as a young gen Z I thought people were still dependent on floppy disks that came with magazines for computer entertainment in '93, when did like the shift happen?

 

Was there a community for these, also why is this animation so on par with modern content?

[Millios]

Floppy disks went out of fashion in like the mid to late 90s and flash drives from what I can find came about around 1999 and true sharing services like youtube caught on during the mid to late 2000s

 

I would say this is a use of an MS paint like programm (possibly photoshop as that was made in '87) where the animator drew each frame as a seperate file and numbered them (cause it doesnt seem to be using cells) which could mean they passed it on film or floppies and or relied on a 3rd party company who also copied them to share/sell as the earliest PtP sharing site that I could find was napster from '99 (gives you a good idea when it started to shift since a lot happened around y2k)

 

54 minutes ago, VirusDumb said:

Was there a community for these, also why is this animation so on par with modern content?

There are tons of ppl who either have kept such items or had them saved on newer devices specifically so yeah there were ppl who genuienly liked such stuff and just got what they could before sites like LimeWire.

Sometimes they were the main selling point like Cartoon DVDs with newspapers (at least this was a thing where I live)

Also "on par with modern content" is an overstatement. It's impresive especially for its time and especially by a not big studio but not really on par with even many of the works of its time never mind ours

For refrence these animations came out during the 90s and objectively they are not comparable

 

[PDifolco]

At that time iirc the thing was to burn CD ROMs with stuff, vastly increased capacity over floppies (400MB vs 1.44 !)

But transfer was to be done physically /in person as there was no Internet

[jaslion]

Just using cdroms really. Using sneakernet

[jmwhite33]

I guess you never heard of cd's.

23 minutes ago, Millios said:

Floppy disks went out of fashion in like the mid to late 90s and flash drives from what I can find came about around 1999 and true sharing services like youtube caught on during the mid to late 2000s

 

I would say this is a use of an MS paint like programm (possibly photoshop as that was made in '87) where the animator drew each frame as a seperate file and numbered them (cause it doesnt seem to be using cells) which could mean they passed it on film or floppies and or relied on a 3rd party company who also copied them to share/sell as the earliest PtP sharing site that I could find was napster from '99 (gives you a good idea when it started to shift since a lot happened around y2k)

 

MS paint, no

Try Illustrator. 

 

14 minutes ago, PDifolco said:

At that time iirc the thing was to burn CD ROMs with stuff, vastly increased capacity over floppies (400MB vs 1.44 !)

But transfer was to be done physically /in person as there was no Internet

don't forget the huge shareware community that existed at the time.

That is probably how 80% of games and programs got recognition.

DOOM was first released as free shareware for example.

and lets not forget about newsgroups (do they even exist anymore). I downloaded LOTS of games, programs and music from newsgroups. Granted on a modem it was like eating soup with a fork, but it worked. 

Big files broken into 1.4 meg chunks then uploaded. Download, compile it back together and viole'. 

 

 

[PDifolco]

10 minutes ago, jmwhite33 said:

I guess you never heard of cd's.

MS paint, no

Try Illustrator. 

 

don't forget the huge shareware community that existed at the time.

That is probably how 80% of games and programs got recognition.

DOOM was first released as free shareware for example.

and lets not forget about newsgroups (do they even exist anymore). I downloaded LOTS of games, programs and music from newsgroups. Granted on a modem it was like eating soup with a fork, but it worked. 

Big files broken into 1.4 meg chunks then uploaded. Download, compile it back together and viole'. 

 

 

Depends when and where exactly

By the end of the 90s "shareware" and outright pirate sites/newsgroups became common, but at the start of the decade there wasn't even CDROMs burners, and when they came out they were very expensive

In Europe we got Internet access around 1995, and with piss poor 33Kb/sec bandwidth (think of it, took more than 6 hours to get 100MB, and over an exclusive voice phone line paid by the minute !!), so it was a mix of old and new practices evolving during the decades

[Eigenvektor]

There were also BBSs, basically a dial up version of forum's.

[Needfuldoer]

Scanners, NLEs, and video capture cards existed in the 90s, you guys... It's not like home multimedia only started when YouTube went live.

 

You could also use a fax machine as a low resolution scanner if you had a fax modem. That's how they digitized the cartoons for Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego.

 

All the Henry and June segments of KaBlam! were drawn by one guy in his house.

 

If you wanted live video, the VideoSpigot and Video Toaster were around. The second generation Power Macs even had AV capture capability from the factory.

 

For distribution of your finished projects, you could either burn files to CD (if you had an expensive CD burner), or dub them off to VHS tape. 

[Millios]

11 minutes ago, Eigenvektor said:

There were also BBSs, basically a dial up version of forum's.

I forgot about those!

Werent they also like slower than any alternatives tho? At least from what I've read about em they were dragging their feet even by the standards they had then

[LogicalDrm]

I wasn't into PCs before 00s so what I say is mainly based on watching documentaries about how things were in the 90s and 80s.

 

Floppies were the way to go until mid to late 90s when CD burners came more available to consumers. Flash drives weren't available for consumers before like 2003, not unless you were into photography. CDs were cheap and burners were cheap. Flash drives were neat because you could overwrite content, but expensive in comparison.

 

At least in Europe, demoscene was huge in 90s and 00s. As in gathering of nerds who would share their interests, projects etc. But I'm sure things spread in schools, college and universities same ways. Someone met cousin who had something new and brought it back for others to see. Internet became a way in 00s even here in frozen North, the land of fast and cheap internet.

 

48 minutes ago, Millios said:

Also "on par with modern content" is an overstatement. It's impresive especially for its time and especially by a not big studio but not really on par with even many of the works of its time never mind ours

For refrence these animations came out during the 90s and objectively they are not comparable

 

You are comparing apples to oringes. Those are hand drawn and filmed to same film live action were. Pixel resolution of computer 640x480. The camera resolution used to film hand drawn animation was multiple times that. So unfair comparison. What would be fair comparison, is also unfair one. Which is Toy Story, released in 1995. Thats computer 3D animation. While what is shared by OP is simple 2D animation. Which is also reason why it holds up. Its not computer generated, per say. Just CAD, computer assisted drawing or pixel animation. The limitation is pixel resolution and colors space. Plus computing power to record it which is why fps isn't great. And which is why scenes are so short. Probably each scene was single video file which were (guessing here) compared into executable in order to be run like it wasn't just animation. 

 

For reference, this is software render from 1993 (by hobbyists):

 

It hold up because most popular US 2D animations use simple drawings and good writing. Like Simpsons. Which is done with same style today than it was in 90s.

[Millios]

43 minutes ago, LogicalDrm said:

You are comparing apples to oringes. Those are hand drawn and filmed to same film live action were. Pixel resolution of computer 640x480. The camera resolution used to film hand drawn animation was multiple times that. So unfair comparison. What would be fair comparison, is also unfair one. Which is Toy Story, released in 1995. Thats computer 3D animation. While what is shared by OP is simple 2D animation. Which is also reason why it holds up. Its not computer generated, per say. Just CAD, computer assisted drawing or pixel animation. The limitation is pixel resolution and colors space. Plus computing power to record it which is why fps isn't great. And which is why scenes are so short. Probably each scene was single video file which were (guessing here) compared into executable in order to be run like it wasn't just animation. 

 

For reference, this is software render from 1993 (by hobbyists):

 

It hold up because most popular US 2D animations use simple drawings and good writing. Like Simpsons. Which is done with same style today than it was in 90s.

Yes I am aware they were handrawn and part of the reason I said was "objectively they are not comparable" was that as well.

Color space I cant comment on cause imo I lack adequate knowledge on the topic so I'll stay on resolution and animation

The limited frames also (other than computing power) are mostly to save on time drawing. It is animated on I believe 3s if my eyes are not deceiving me(animation usually is 24fps and 24 frames of movement are 1s, if there is animation every other frame then its on 2s aka 12 frames with movement and 3s means only 8 frames have movement) aka this

And yes as bigger companies the clips I used are on 1s rather than 3s aka they have 3 times the amount of drawings and movement but again indie projects have have done in the 90s like the thief and the cobbler (beautiful animation btw)

As for the resolution (for the clips I used)... it gets tricky to pin down what it is and or was cause they used Cels where you cant point to a resolution size due to differences in paper and format (some pages use different paper sizes so they can pan) so there isnt 1 general resolution of paper to pixels, in 90% of the time they used 16mm film which CAN go up to 2k (4 times the resolution of that animation OP shared) but they were made for 480p displays and thats also where many of the issues it has came about in actually making that footage in higher resolution. Tho if I had to give a number with my eyes I'd say more than 1x but less than 2x times the resolution so a less than 1080p but more than 480 for the production

For context, many older shows like DB and DBZ have issues with newer releases because they are on film and made for specific resolutions. There are many attempts to upscale and remaster it but more often than not it actually cant be done that well (at least to a degree thats satisfactory and doenst ruin other aspects) even tho some have used the og film which can (in theory at least) be upscaled
This can give you an Idea of what I mean where even the best version suffers from some pixelation in the (Not 100% if its this) 1080p resolution they aimed for (partly cause they upscaled older footage)

If you got anything that proves me wrong let me know, always open to be proven wrong if I am wrong

[starsmine]

LANs, WANs and sneaker nets. 

We had internet in the 80s, and animation studios were usually in house so a LAN. 

2 hours ago, Millios said:

Floppy disks went out of fashion in like the mid to late 90s and flash drives from what I can find came about around 1999 and true sharing services like youtube caught on during the mid to late 2000s

I would not say floppys were out of fasion till mid-late 00s because of how easy they were to use. We moved to CDs sure, but CDs with their different R formats was not as simple as floppies were.  But for animation studios you would just straight up sneaker net HDD. 
Flash drives were not a common thing till the late 00s and before that they were like 32MBs and less stable. 

[LogicalDrm]

1 hour ago, Millios said:

If you got anything that proves me wrong let me know, always open to be proven wrong if I am wrong

My point was not that. Just noting that your examples aren't good comparison since techniques are so different. 

[Millios]

3 minutes ago, LogicalDrm said:

My point was not that. Just noting that your examples aren't good comparison since techniques are so different. 

Ahh ok ok got you

[Eigenvektor]

3 hours ago, Millios said:

I forgot about those!

Werent they also like slower than any alternatives tho? At least from what I've read about em they were dragging their feet even by the standards they had then

If I'm not misremembering, faster was usually single digit megabits, and pretty much exclusively large universities (of course at the time that was screaming fast).

 

Friend on mine ran a BBS for some time, first using a 7200 baud modem, then upgraded to 14400 and I think even ISDN much later. So yeah it was slow and only supported one user at a time (single phone line). Larger BBSs often had multiple lines, which actually allowed for concurrent users and real time chat.

 

Most were fairly tight knit communities and you often got access through word of mouth. Some even kicked you if you couldn't explain how you got the number, others were more open. I think my friend initially just dialed random numbers until he found some, and eventually advertised his own phone number on there.

[VirusDumb]

7 hours ago, Millios said:

Also "on par with modern content" is an overstatement. It's impresive especially for its time and especially by a not big studio but not really on par with even many of the works of its time never mind ours

For refrence these animations came out during the 90s and objectively they are not comparable

No that's like comparing a tuner jdm car with an electric scooter

 

6 hours ago, LogicalDrm said:

For reference, this is software render from 1993 (by hobbyists):

That's like comparing a concept electric car with an electric scooter  

 

 

I meant like in terms of what indie one person animators make today, the quality of the work and art style is pretty much on par with modern content. A better comparison would be like what small animation youtubers make with their wacom tablets and iPads, the fact that the person made it with an amiga is kinda cool 

[Millios]

10 hours ago, VirusDumb said:

I meant like in terms of what indie one person animators make today, the quality of the work and art style is pretty much on par with modern content. A better comparison would be like what small animation youtubers make with their wacom tablets and iPads, the fact that the person made it with an amiga is kinda cool 

Artstyle is subjective. Tho at least in my eyes its the generic furry artstyle many animations of that community use and have used for quite a while in numerous TV shows like sonic the hedgehog, much like the Seth MacFarlane cartoons aka family guy, american dad, the cleveland show etc 

TL DR it isnt on par its just a regular style that has existed for years like rubber hose cartoons or hanna barbara and disney style cartoons

And for even more indie digital modern animation we got dudes like this

Or meat canyon who for animation has 3-6 animators that come and go rather than a dedicated team and that number includes himself I believe (TheOdd1sOut, Jayden animation and others I believe have bigger dedicated teams so they arent that comparable)

 

 

Additional note: I found how they were distributed

They were extras on specific magazines, both in the form of floppies and CD/DVD disks

[LogicalDrm]

11 hours ago, VirusDumb said:

I meant like in terms of what indie one person animators make today, the quality of the work and art style is pretty much on par with modern content. A better comparison would be like what small animation youtubers make with their wacom tablets and iPads, the fact that the person made it with an amiga is kinda cool 

Well yes and no. As long as style is simple, anything made with same simple style looks alike. Like my previous note about Simpsons and many other mainstream US-style animations. Without knowing backstory, its impossible to say whether coloring style is intentional or technological limitation for example. Modern artists have better tools but might opt to make their art simplistic to drive more their point. In gaming, Minecraft is perfect example of choice to go with simple pixel graphics over smooth 3D render. You might look at something like Doom 1 or Duke Nukem 3D from mid-90s and think they have rather good quality. If you compare them to games like Minecraft or Roblox where style chosen is simplistic. 

[Kisai]

On 6/21/2025 at 5:42 AM, VirusDumb said:

So I found about this Eric Schwartz guy and this animation is from 1995, but I also found one from 1993, which I feel is a bit too nsfw to share here, but I wanted to know is how did these things spread? Like last time I read about this era as a young gen Z I thought people were still dependent on floppy disks that came with magazines for computer entertainment in '93, when did like the shift happen?

 

Was there a community for these, also why is this animation so on par with modern content?

Flash videos were tiny. If I were to load a flash file from 1994 and use the flash player itself to scale it to 4K and record it as a mp4 for youtube it would go from like 1MB to 1GB. That is how efficient flash is. Flash files are not FBF animation typically, they are at their core a puppet show using objects and techniques you saw in limited animation (think "Scooby Doo", "The Jetsons", "Yogi Bear") 

 

Newgrounds is where a lot of this stuff wound up.

 

[Mark Kaine]

On 6/21/2025 at 2:42 PM, VirusDumb said:

So I found about this Eric Schwartz guy and this animation is from 1995, but I also found one from 1993, which I feel is a bit too nsfw to share here, but I wanted to know is how did these things spread? Like last time I read about this era as a young gen Z I thought people were still dependent on floppy disks that came with magazines for computer entertainment in '93, when did like the shift happen?

 

Was there a community for these, also why is this animation so on par with modern content?

Floppies in magazines etc,later cds/dvds, it was very common until end of the 2000s...

 

On 6/21/2025 at 2:42 PM, VirusDumb said:

, also why is this animation so on par with modern content?

Because animation is art and you can't just throw more "power" at it to make it better, it doesn't work like that at all.

 

 

 

[Mark Kaine]

On 6/22/2025 at 10:20 AM, Millios said:

Artstyle is subjective

Well yes, but animation quality isn't, for example I don't think anything surpassed "Bad Apple" yet and probably never will and that's from ~2007...

 

 

[Millios]

15 minutes ago, Mark Kaine said:

Well yes, but animation quality isn't, for example I don't think anything surpassed "Bad Apple" yet and probably never will and that's from ~2007...

Hang around anime pages and subreddits and you quickly learn ppl are a)idiots cause they fight over the most miniscule details b)animation quality for everyone has different criteria

Case in point, demon slayer and solo leveling. Phenomenal animation for both but because 1 does not seem like what some consider good animation they are called just ok.

In my eyes nothing can topple toguro vs yusuke cause I consider it a masterclass of action meeting animation meeting phenomenal story

 

Honorable mention to Hajime no ippo tho cause sendo vs ippo is like close 2nd 

[wanderingfool2]

On 6/21/2025 at 6:52 AM, Millios said:

I would say this is a use of an MS paint like programm (possibly photoshop as that was made in '87) where the animator drew each frame as a seperate file and numbered them (cause it doesnt seem to be using cells) which could mean they passed it on film or floppies and or relied on a 3rd party company who also copied them to share/sell as the earliest PtP sharing site that I could find was napster from '99 (gives you a good idea when it started to shift since a lot happened around y2k)

You know they say what they use in the literal credits of this

 

ADPro DPaint 4 & 5, Brilliance Lightwave 3D, DirOpus5 Anim Workshop, AudiomasterIv MovieSetter

 

Anyways though, they probably used regular animation techniques in building it.  Created a background that they have as a base layer and then put the other stuff on top of that (which isn't nearly as tedious as it sounds then when you compare it to drawing a separate frame each time).

 

On 6/21/2025 at 5:42 AM, VirusDumb said:

So I found about this Eric Schwartz guy and this animation is from 1995, but I also found one from 1993, which I feel is a bit too nsfw to share here, but I wanted to know is how did these things spread? Like last time I read about this era as a young gen Z I thought people were still dependent on floppy disks that came with magazines for computer entertainment in '93, when did like the shift happen?

 

Was there a community for these, also why is this animation so on par with modern content?

Well I mean the animation still looks dated in the paletted colours...but realistically it looks modern because the style hasn't gone out of fashion, there isn't the analog blur that would hint of it's "age" and there really isn't much to show "age" (generic type of clothing that still fits with the era, animals which still are animated today).  2d animation is a lot more forgiving as long as there isn't dated references

 

An example, Dragon Ball doesn't look modern because you can compare it with current day anime etc and it has the hand painted background looks etc that modern ones don't have which makes it feel old.  Mary Poppins (specifically the cartoon scene) feels modern (analog cameras an aside) because they did the whole "green screen" stuff in a way that even to today we can't compare to how it was done (seriously though, this was brilliant...although it was like a million dollar lense they had to use at the time...literally there was security to keep the one piece of equipment safe)

 

On 6/21/2025 at 5:42 AM, VirusDumb said:

So I found about this Eric Schwartz guy and this animation is from 1995, but I also found one from 1993, which I feel is a bit too nsfw to share here, but I wanted to know is how did these things spread? Like last time I read about this era as a young gen Z I thought people were still dependent on floppy disks that came with magazines for computer entertainment in '93, when did like the shift happen?

It was probably via tape.  Playback onto a tape from your computer and record it.  You know have the "master" and can keep on recording onto new tapes.  Then of course by the late 90's you start having CD's which would be more than enough to fit the entire format onto it (in a compressed but lossless form)

 

It's hard to tell with YouTube and modern day interpolation, but I think it probably was 12 fps (seriously the original likely actually looks choppier but modern day stuff with interlacing the two frames I think makes it look better/smoother).  Anyways, 12 fps, at 640x480, 8 bit palette, that's 3.51 MiB/s in raw form, with no compression...even with a basic RLE the style of this you probably would get at least 1 MiB/s (probably kiB/s though)...so more than enough space to fit a 4 minute video file onto a CD (when it did come out).

 

But yea, my guess, put onto analog tapes and distributed that way etc.  Maybe using a video file format at the time (but this was still back in the days when there were tons of different competing formats etc)...where AVI was the container with many different codecs...if they could get the license to MPEG-1, and used the heavier compression which could get like a 26:1 ratio, then it might just start to be feasible for a floppy disk.  Given it was a digital without a changing background it's completely possible that there might have been a video format that supported animations like this as well to achieve even a better compression ratio (as many, and I mean many of the frames are pretty much identical to each other...so even a simple Frame 2 - Frame 1 would probably net you a 100:1 maybe even 200:1 ratio)

 

This is just my guess, though...generally at the time my thought would be that it would be put onto some form of tape.  I did that for a school project back in the early 2000's...back when DVD's were just getting started.  Hand drawn computer animations etc, and voiceover....then play the audio and video back and start recording on the vhs player...cheapest way to do it (yes I was one of those kids back in school that did crazy things like that for a project)

[DeerDK]

On 6/22/2025 at 10:20 AM, Millios said:

Artstyle is subjective. Tho at least in my eyes its the generic furry artstyle many animations of that community use and have used for quite a while in numerous TV shows like sonic the hedgehog, much like the Seth MacFarlane cartoons aka family guy, american dad, the cleveland show etc 

TL DR it isnt on par its just a regular style that has existed for years like rubber hose cartoons or hanna barbara and disney style cartoons

And for even more indie digital modern animation we got dudes like this

Or meat canyon who for animation has 3-6 animators that come and go rather than a dedicated team and that number includes himself I believe (TheOdd1sOut, Jayden animation and others I believe have bigger dedicated teams so they arent that comparable)

 

 

Additional note: I found how they were distributed

They were extras on specific magazines, both in the form of floppies and CD/DVD disks

Oh I remember the weird magazines of the 90s. Some of the cd-roms were real treasure troves. Shareware, short videos, game demos. 

I had a demo cd with Close Combat - A bridge too far. 

There was only one playable map, but damn did I play it a lot. 

[Millios]

26 minutes ago, DeerDK said:

Oh I remember the weird magazines of the 90s. Some of the cd-roms were real treasure troves. Shareware, short videos, game demos. 

I had a demo cd with Close Combat - A bridge too far. 

There was only one playable map, but damn did I play it a lot. 

You ain't got the real European (specifically eastern European) experience till you got one with the most random animated show.

I once got a freaking 3D Italian cars knock off movie

Also for me those were a thing well into the 2010s and went out of fashion... I think around COVID-19 aka 2020