A Moogle  🏳️‍🌈 💻 🎮 🎶 🇸🇪

Western Gun even has the destructible cacti! But another thing that stuck out to me while redrawing the sprites for my video is that the cowboys appear to have been originally drawn 2:1 and then smooshed?pic.twitter.com/oKiYyZUCaU

Indeed, if I take the existing blurry video footage (L) and smoosh it horizontally (R), everything looks like large square pixels. I'd love to confirm with Nishikado whether they were originally designed this way, and what technical limitation he might've been working around.pic.twitter.com/FOLO2lZ6sG

Before Miyamoto created Mario, he did sprite work on a western game called Sheriff, and it's hard not to see the influence of Western Gun in the squat little cowboy. In fact, Taito licensed the Nintendo game themselves and renamed it Western Gun Part II!pic.twitter.com/f9RGnbShx2

If you look at the character portrait on the flyer, the sheriff's mustache is likely intended to be a mouth. In fact, the large chin and slanted mouth look very Popeye-esque, as though he already had Popeye on the brain.pic.twitter.com/fQHd9gi5tg

For all we know, maybe the sheriff's resemblance to Popeye is why Miyamoto was asked to try doing a Popeye game. Nintendo already had the license for playing cards and G&W so why not.pic.twitter.com/kltKABuCNS

But Miyamoto struggled to get a good likeness within the squat proportions, so they dropped the Popeye idea. When he realized the mouth could be a mustache, the head became shorter to allow for more body language, his proportions even more in line with Western Gun.pic.twitter.com/TAssyw0GLZ

And just to show you another example of how all my projects weirdly connect to each other, it was Exidy (of Death Race fame, and creators of the lost first playable female character in Score) who first brought Nintendo's Sheriff to the U.S. as Bandido.pic.twitter.com/YzKcsBOjju