The PS2 Fossil Record - Fantavision

The early rush to get out software used to produce a lot of strange objects. The fundamental hardware design of a new system was almost totally incompatible with how a previous piece of hardware worked. That's not even mentioning that the leap between generations meant that a hastily converted game from a prior console was going to look antiquated no matter what anyway. This meant that a lot of ideas that would probably be considered too thin of an idea to build a game off of managed to sneak out around launch if they could be made quickly. This combined with a desire to show off the capabilities of new hardware gives rise to the tech demo game. Few tech demo games managed to attract the brief infamy that Fantavision did though.

I guess it'd be fair to start with the tech demo here. Fantavision was built off of a particle effects demonstration Sony gave near the PS2's reveal in 1999. Particle effects in this case just being anything that simulates quickly dissipating substances, frequently lights or gaseous materials. Naturally, a very eye-catching way to demonstrate this on the new hardware was to simulate fireworks. For the time it's a fairly impressive, if limited, demonstration. Lots of bright colors and pretty patterns, and you don't need to know the intricacies of particle systems to enjoy looking at it for a minute. Scattered as it was among demonstrations of Ridge Racer girls walking down runways, it was well-integrated into the PS2's marketing blitz but didn't call much attention to itself. Then it became a game. Then a few years later it became something of a meme. Not a proper meme though, just the sort of joke shared between the kind of people who scoured a lot of PS2 era bargain bins. The shelf life of being impressed by Fantavision was about a three month window that the world quickly left behind.

That history is probably the most interesting thing about Fantavision, but it's worth going into what the game actually is. Fantavision's nominally a sort of match three puzzle game. You have a cursor you can drag from firework to firework as it enters the sky. Select three like-colored fireworks and you're allowed to detonate them. You lose points and eventually the game the more fireworks are allowed to disappear from the screen without detonating. Occasionally you'll see fireworks that flash multiple colors, these can be used to create chains between two different colors of fireworks. Moving between different colored fireworks and causing as many detonations as you can is supposed to be the fun part of the game. In that sense the core identity of the game isn't that evolved from the tech demo itself. While there is a minor degree of depth to the chaining system, the overall interface holds the game back a lot.

It's a weird thing to harp on, the interface, but the game just doesn't communicate stakes or urgency well. To break it down, I want to first contrast with a traditional puzzle game, match three or otherwise. Usually there's a tall vertical well that is slowly filling up, either from the bottom being pushed up or items dropping from the top. The player has to avoid that well filling completely by clearing whatever doodads are filling it up. Visually this is very easy to understand, all the information you need is part of the playfield itself. Fantavision doesn't do that—there's an energy meter in the corner that can be easy to lose track of because the playfield is constantly exploding. The playfield can really only fill so much as well, both for technical reasons and by reasons of how the game controls. The cursor can only move between like colored fireworks and it can move in a full 360 degrees when jumping between these fireworks. Between these two things, a screen that's too cluttered would actually make the game nearly impossible to control. The other side of this is that it makes the game feel non-interactive in a lot of situations. These aspects of the interface come together to make it hard to get invested in playing well. The urgency isn't really there to make the game feel fast paced, and the controls can feel like twirling the stick at random is as effective as playing properly. The game isn't so poorly conceived that this is the case, but its feedback is poor enough that it feels like that, which for player psychology is just as bad.

The game is using the analog stick to its full potential I suppose. Since fireworks can be at arbitrary angles from each other it needs and relies on the nuances of analog control. The game itself is so simple that it doesn't necessarily always feel like that, but credit where it's due. This wasn't just a graphical tech demo, it feels likely that it was at least in part built around the guaranteed availability of 360 degrees of motion. The right analog stick obviously isn't used since so few buttons are, but that'd be kinda unfair to criticize it for.

Being a showcase for the PS2 was its entire raison d'etre. There are particle effects you'd never have seen on the PS1 here. There really isn't much else, but it's clear that's the entire reason this game got past concept approval. This wouldn't be the only desperation move Sony ever pulled trying to force a tech demo into being a real game, but I think Super Rub-a-Dub is even more forgotten than this is. The entire game here is an excuse to show off flashing lights and on that level it's a success.

There isn't much of a legacy to Fantavision. Puzzle games of this type weren't really in style at the time and this game didn't do much to revive them. It's almost the definition of a launch window game. You could maybe be dazzled by it for a few hours back when it was new, but there's essentially no putting the genie back in the bottle. If you weren't there to be dazzled by Fantavision when it was new, the odds are you'll never be able to see why it even made sense at the time. Despite being a blip on the radar this is oddly one of the only PS2 games Sony officially has kept in circulation, as part of the anemic "PS2 on PS4" lineup. This is likely due both to them owning the rights, lock stock and barrel, and because it's such a simple title it represents few emulation issues. It's hard to recommend even as a curiosity though—inside three minutes a new player has seen the snapshot in time this game represents. At best it’s a historical artifact of what kinds of graphical effects represented obsessions in the late 90s.