--- title: "AI Makes 1993 Video Game Look Photorealistic" description: "Upscaling the iconic 1993 fighting game Virtua fighter using AI, creating comically photorealistic models of the characters? Why not." date: "2022-10-06" modified: "2022-10-06" authors: - name: "Frank Landymore" job_title: "Contributing Writer" link: "https://futurism.com/authors/flandymore" url: "https://futurism.com/the-byte/ai-1993-video-game-photorealistic" categories: - "Artificial Intelligence" tags: - "ai art" - "stable diffusion" - "the digest" - "video games" --- # AI Makes 1993 Video Game Look Photorealistic ![Upscaling the iconic 1993 fighting game Virtua fighter using AI, creating comically photorealistic models of the characters? Why not.]() *\Image: Colin Willamson\* ## Kick Ass When Sega released Virtua Fighter in 1993, it was a game changer — literally. Widely hailed as the first fighting game with full 3D graphics, it upped the technical prowess of a genre that had been largely confined to 2D sprites, with titles like Tekken following the next year with 3D graphics of its own. Now, in the age of both remastered gaming classics and the boom in AI generated images, it’s fitting to revisit Virtua Fighter with a technological new coat of paint. A Twitter thread from artist Colin Williamson shows us just that, thanks to the power of Stable Diffusion. Normally a text to image model, Williamson used an image-to-image variation called Automatic1111, according to [Williamson's tweet](). And the results are pretty impressive — not to mention amusing, intentionally or otherwise. https://twitter.com/ColinWilliamson/status/1576760990607155200?s=20&t=dVxisuMxa9lVAQyDBcjwEg https://twitter.com/ColinWilliamson/status/1576761000094683137 ## Polygone With the help of the AI model, Williamson transports this early 90s titles straight into photorealism territory, looking less like a graphical upgrade and more like actors portraying the characters in a cutscene, to an extremely comical effect. "When I played this game back in middle school, I was like 'That's it. Graphics can never get better than this,'" said Williamson in [a tweet](). "And my dad was like 'I'm not so sure, this looks kind of crappy.'" In hindsight, their dad wasn't wrong. Getting it to look just right though, even with an all powerful AI, takes quite a bit of tinkering. "Just describe the character, and img2img does its best," Williamson told *Ars Technica* [in an interview](). "Though the hardest part was simply figuring out how to describe the characters' clothes." "Once I found a good prompt, I'd do a batch of around 50 and cherry-pick the funniest ones," Williamson continued. "I tried this thing called 'negative prompting,' where you tell the AI stuff like 'please don't draw messed-up-looking hands,' which does an excellent job in that now your characters have only six fingers instead of seven." **More on AI art:** [AI Dreams Up What Your Fave Dead Celebs Would Look Like Today]() ## Author At Futurism, my work has often centered on bringing a sense of clarity and insight to complex topics ranging from the regulation of emerging technologies to the esoteric ideologies of Silicon Valley executives, while striving not to lose the poetic sense of awe inspired by often-obscure fields like astrophysics and quantum computing. I broke the story of CNET using AI to produce articles that turned out to be riddled with factual errors and plagiarism — a dam-breaking inflection point, as I've reported, that's inspired copycats and endless discourse while beguiling stakeholders ranging from tech giants to purveyors of spam around the web. My work at Futurism has been cited by publications including CBS News, the Los Angeles Times, Vice, Gizmodo, Engadget, the Verge, and Vanity Fair. I grew up in locales ranging from India to China, and now live in the exotic suburbs of Virginia. In my free time, I'm an avid reader of weird sci-fi literature, an aficionado of East Asian cinema, and, regrettably, a relapsed gamer. Allegedly, I’m working on a debut novel, currently untitled. ### Author social links [Bluesky]()