Photos used in Chrono Trigger (and Radical Dreamers)

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There have been efforts to identify textures used in old 3D games like Mario 64 for a while now. Fairly recently I watched this video about where a bunch of the graphics in Doom came from. It specifically mentions a series of photo CDs called "MediaClips" that were the source of some of the game's textures. Chrono Trigger was developed at a time where Square was just starting to dip their toes into the world of 3D rendered graphics (they even used some in Chrono Trigger itself) so I figured they'd probably have some of these types of CDs lying around for sourcing textures from. I've long thought that some of the backgrounds in CT looked like they may have originated as photographs, so I downloaded a few of these MediaClips CDs from archive.org and started poking around. I almost immediately got a hit.

This is photo "002" on the "MediaClips - Majestic Places" CD:


And this is the sky over Zenan Bridge:


They obviously touched it up by hand, but there's no doubt in my mind that this photo was used.

Encouraged, I kept poking around. There's this photo of the moon on the "Media Clips - World View" CD:


I checked it against the moon behind Magus's castle, but it wasn't a match. Later, for completely unrelated reasons, I was looking at the Radical Dreamers page on Spriters Resource and found this moon, which definitely is a match:


Then I remembered that there's a moon in the Chrono Trigger endings where the characters float away holding balloons. It's hard to say for certain, but I think this might also be a match:


The moon photo on the CD is titled "APOLLO11A", so out of curiosity I googled "apollo 11 moon photos" to see if this exact image is common enough that it would pop right up in an image search. It did not, but while I was scrolling I found this other one from Wikimedia:


The red circle is supposed to be pointing out the location of "Oceanus Procellarum" and is irrelevant here. The original photo without the circle was apparently taken by Wikimedia user Silvercat with a camera that came out in 2007, so this exact photo obviously wasn't used for Chrono Trigger, but there's definitely an extremely similar one out there somewhere that was used for the moon behind Magus's castle:


Kind of a bummer that it's not quite the right one, but I think it's pretty strong evidence that a photo was in fact used.

That's all I've found so far, but I believe there are more. Maybe not from MediaClips CDs specifically. There were lots of other stock photo CDs being sold back then. I think I just got really lucky with that Zenan Bridge sky. I'll keep looking though.

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I haven't found any other matches from Chrono Trigger yet, though I'm still looking, but I did find a couple of interesting things from Final Fantasy VI. I debated about whether I should post them in this thread since they're only very loosely related, but I figured I might as well.

This photo of Earth is on the "MediaClips - World View" CD:


The file name is "WORLDVW". It was used in this cutscene.

Here's an illustration of how it was modified:


It's probably worth noting that it looks a little bit different in the cutscene because there's an additional translucent landmass graphic overlaid to show the split continents drifting apart. You can see it here on the Spriter's Resource page.

Next up is the FFVI Opera House. This one is a little like the Magus Moon, in that I don't know the specific image source, but I still have a pretty good idea how it was made.


The huge curtains seem to be cobbled together from images from two real life opera houses. Palais Garnier Opera House in Paris, and Mariinsky Theatre in Saint Petersburg. I don't know anything about opera houses, so I didn't know this was a thing, but apparently it's normal for them to have a huge flat curtain with a painting on it of a much more intricate set of curtains, and that's what you're seeing in the photos.

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I found another one from Chrono Trigger while doing my latest "alpha" mockup. This is the background graphics behind the Queen Zeal boss fight atop the black omen. The photo is NILERIV2, from the MediaClips - World View CD again.