DeluxePaint

~ the obituary ~

i never owned an amiga. the amiga was a machine that did not really land in turkey at consumer scale. the people who had one in ankara in the late eighties were the kind of hobbyists who imported a computer through a cousin in germany. by the time i got a pc at home it was a 386 running ms-dos and the paint program in the box was microsoft paintbrush, not deluxepaint.

deluxepaint shipped in november 1985 for the commodore amiga 1000. dan silva wrote it at electronic arts. trip hawkins, who ran ea then, bundled it as a free promotional disc with the machine so amiga customers had something to actually do on the new hardware. color cycling was the headline feature, you could mark a range of palette indices and the os would rotate them on a timer to fake animation without redrawing a single pixel. waterfalls and blinking marquees ran for free.

the ms-dos port came in 1988. by then the amiga was losing the consumer war to the pc and ea ported deluxepaint over to keep the franchise alive on the winning platform. that version became the pixel-art tool of the early-nineties pc game industry. the id software people drew wolfenstein 3d and doom sprites in deluxepaint. lucasarts drew the secret of monkey island in the same tool. version four added 4096-color hold-and-modify support in 1991. version five in 1995 added 24-bit rgb. by then commodore had already filed for bankruptcy in april 1994 and the platform deluxepaint had been built for was gone.

deluxepaint is in the history books because of what was drawn in it, not because anyone i knew used it. the amiga demoscene drew its entire iconography in deluxepaint between 1986 and 1993. the wolfenstein guards i shot in middle school internet cafes were deluxepaint sprites that id software's adrian carmack had hand-pixeled at electronic arts' tool. by the time photoshop reached the mid-nineties as the default raster editor, deluxepaint had already done its job.

~ the case file ~

~ what it was ~

deluxepaint was an indexed-palette raster editor written for a machine that could only show 32 or 64 colors at once. the design choices flow from that constraint. color cycling existed because the amiga could rotate palette entries faster than it could redraw pixels. the brushes were small because the chip ram was small. the file format was iff, the electronic arts interchange file family that the amiga ecosystem standardized around.

the animbrush was the part everyone copied later. you could grab a sequence of frames as a single brush and stamp it like a rubber stamp. the marching-aliens animation in countless amiga demos was an animbrush. when adobe added timeline animation to photoshop fifteen years later, the underlying idea was the one dan silva had shipped in 1989.

~ what carried over ~

deluxepaint never had a successor at electronic arts. ea pivoted toward console publishing in the mid-nineties and the in-house tools group quietly disbanded. dan silva moved on. the amiga community kept iv and v running on emulators for as long as they could. by 2000 the pixel-art audience had migrated to pro motion on windows and graphics gale on japan-side, both of which copied deluxepaint's keyboard shortcuts and brush model directly.

aseprite, the indie-game pixel editor that became the modern standard around 2016, is in a direct lineage from deluxepaint through pro motion. the way you cycle through palette indices with a hotkey, the way animation frames live alongside the canvas as a strip, all of that was deluxepaint first. people who never touched an amiga still use the tool shape dan silva drew in 1985.

~ the long tail ~

the doom development team gave a talk once where adrian carmack mentioned that the hellknight sprite was drawn pixel by pixel in deluxepaint ii enhanced on a 486. id had no in-house tooling for sprite art in 1993, deluxepaint did the job and john romero had used it on amiga already. that detail is why deluxepaint shows up in interviews to this day. half the canonical pc game art of the early nineties was made in dan silva's program at a desk in a strip mall in mesquite, texas.

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