Game Central Station: The Worlds of Wreck-It Ralph (Rich Moore, 2012)

**Fig. 1 - Game Central Station in Disney’s computer-animated *Wreck-It Ralph* (Rich Moore, 2012).**

Wreck-It Ralph (Rich Moore, 2012) follows the antagonist of a fictional arcade game known as Fix-It Felix. After escaping his 8-bit pixelated world and joining fellow outcast Vanellope von Schweetz in the brightly tinted world of Sugar Rush, the eponymous Ralph learns that their quest for redemption could lead to a massive shutdown of the arcade. Through its visual style and videogame narrative, Wreck-It Ralph felt as if it was calling me and my sector of young gamers, and the animation team at Disney managed to successfully bring in elements of popular gaming tropes and familiar characters to build the many worlds connecting through Game Central Station (Fig. 1). Ralph and Vanellope must leave his blocky forest, make a pit stop in a futuristic galaxy ridden by alien bugs, and finish in first place with a bug-ridden character to make his mark as a good guy. Wreck-It Ralph utilizes the developmental tools of arcade-era gaming to make each fictional world stand out from each other, but as I will demonstrate in this blog, they come together and complement each other to establish for the richness of Ralph and Vanellope’s heroic journey.

The film makes the decision to begin in the world of Fix-It Felix, and Ralph’s frustrations come from the continuous cycle of playing the destructive bad guy role in contrast to Felix and his celebrated repairs (Fig. 2). Their world is modeled after the iconic arcade climber Donkey Kong, but the designers use that framework to design this world as a small town. In the opening scene, Ralph travels back to his arcade game only to find that the inhabitants of his world are throwing a party honoring the game for its thirtieth anniversary. Accompanied by shrubby trees and a nearby train track, the focal point of the game is the building in the centre of the neighborhood. This serves as the objective for the player to help repair the tenants’ apartments while shutting Ralph out to be left alone with his pile of bricks. In addition to invoking the feel of “arcade machines of the 1970s and 1980s”, the in-game universe utilizes the square as a developmental tool in designing characters and elements within their world (Golding 2013). Ralph and Felix are the only characters in their world to move naturally while the others are regulated to a chopped-up framerate, which again is meant to mimic the actions of pixelated arcade games from the mid-eighties. This is a modern take on the technique of limited animation, for the designers are shifting the tenants by having their movements “held to a minimum” to indicate that they are designed for an old-school video game from the 1980s (Graham 1983, 386). Ralph shares the same rate of movement as a normal human being despite the lack of care towards his role as the villain, thus setting his journey into motion as he moves to Game Central Station and in search for a medal of honour.

By contrast, the fictional world of the game Hero’s Duty (Fig. 3), inspired by simulated first-person shooters like Call of Duty, takes place during an intergalactic war of humans against alien bugs and allows the player to win a medal in the end. Ralph hijacks the game by intercepting a player suit and walking amongst other armed soldiers including Sgt. Calhoun, but he soon finds after entering combat that their world feels more complex as opposed to his 8-bit town. While the square was used to replicate classic 8-bit games for Fix-It Felix, the designers here create a hyper-realistic world for Calhoun that shows how technology has evolved since the arcade first opened its doors. The movie was the first Disney project to implement a new Camera Capture system which provided artists the tools to replicate a live-action camera layout in an animated feature. In the case of Hero’s Duty, the system was implemented to provide a first-person view for players in the arcade. Inspired by war movies like Saving Private Ryan (Steven Spielberg, 1998), the action that Ralph suffers through is intensified as each scene “add[s] shake and motion…energy and excitement” until there is so much action happening in one environment (Sarto 2013). Ralph ultimately does manage to win the medal, albeit by breaking into the final level and stealing it for himself, but his actions will catch up with him as he forms a relationship for the better.

After surviving an alien battle, Ralph finally enters the world of the highly-sweetened kart racer Sugar Rush (Fig. 3). While the fictional game is inspired by MarioKart, the designers needed to go further in depicting a landscape made entirely of candy. The visual development artists collaborated with food photographers to build miniature model castles, and this would act as an outline for the animators to fine-tune the way certain food elements look in this particular environment. Once the protagonist starts a friendship with Vanellope, who is revealed to be a glitch within its source code, they are hunted by King Candy, who is more than he seems on the surface. In one sequence, King Candy enters a secret room of his castle where he can alter the source code of the game at his discretion. He manages to grab the golden medal, the same one that was stolen from Ralph by Vanellope to enter the grand prix, and places it within his character data as part of a plan to wipe the glitch out of his land. From a design perspective, Rich Moore conceptualized this space to be an “algorithmic non-space, devoid of perspectival imagery” of the kind behind all games in the current age of digital media (Wagner and Jang 2016, 135). This area is exclusively under the control of the King to disable any characters that he chooses, but the actions delivered by Ralph help to change that notion by saving Vanellope and letting her become a true character in the game.

Across the three central environments, Ralph manages to achieve recognition for his work and starts being respected amongst his peers. After realizing that his current lifestyle in the Fix-It Felix game is no longer sustainable, his encounter with Hero’s Duty allowed him to break out of his antagonistic boundaries. Had it not been for defying King Candy and saving Vanellope from being erased in Sugar Rush, he would not have been redeemed by his peers and those outside of his own game. His actions showed that he is willing to do anything to be seen as an equal compared to Felix, and the film succeeds in using the backdrop of game design to build contradicting, yet complementary, universes with dedication towards the craft of animation. Wreck-It Ralph manages to stand out in Disney’s animated canon by appealing to every generation of game players through its art direction and world-building, and the attention to detail succeeds in utilising the elements of an arcade to provide the necessary power-ups in developing an underestimated hero.

**Article published: November 1, 2024**

References

Golding, Daniel. 2013. “Arcade Projections.” Screen Education 69 (April): 38–45.

Graham, Donald. 1983. Composing Pictures: Still and Moving. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold Publishers.

Sarto, Dan. 2013. “All the World’s a Virtual Stage in Disney’s New Camera Capture System.” Animation World Network (January 3, 2013), available at: www.awn.com/vfxworld/all-worlds-virtual-stage-disneys-new-camera-capture-system

Wagner, Keith B., & Jang, In-gyoo. 2016. “The 3-D Animated Codescape: Imperfection and Digital Labor Zones in Wall-E (2008) and Wreck-It Ralph (2012).” animation: an interdisciplinary journal 11, no. 2: 130–145.

Biography

Rudan Daniel is a student at the University of Texas at Dallas, Harry W. Bass School of Arts, Humanities, and Technology. He is focusing on a generalist's path in all fields of the technology market, but he has an interest in analyzing the creative mediums of film, television, and gaming. Earlier versions of this text were developed with the help of Dr. Christine Veras and peers from the Animation Studies course.