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How could the designers of old games possibly do anything other than design for CRTs? They were almost certainly looking at their art displayed on CRTs, and if

How could the designers of old games possibly do anything other than design for CRTs? They were almost certainly looking at their art displayed on CRTs, and if it didn't look right on a CRT, they would adjust it until they did. As for saying that pixel art conveys or implies a higher resolution image, I worded my point so poorly as to be wrong. It has nothing to do with resolution per se. You explained what I was trying to say much better: good pixel art presents an image with few details but conveys the impression of a much higher-detail image by encouraging the viewer's mind to interpolate. And you also make a good point that this feature is not unique to pixel art. I also agree with your claim that the best pixel artists are simply good artists who happen to be working in the medium of pixel art. Anyway, my original point was that you can't really get pixel art that properly conveys the important details and encourages the viewer to imagine the rest simply by down-sampling higher-resolution art.

Retra 8y ago
They designed on CRTs, not for them. There's a subtle difference. Imagine I'm trying to optimize a computer program. If I do it on machine A, then I'm optimizing on A, but only for A if I pay particular attention to the architecture of A to drive optimization decisions. On the other hand, if I'm making high-level optimizations -- like using more efficient data structures -- I'm still optimizing, but my program will still run just as fast in other environments, because the specific optimizations I'm doing aren't special features of machine A. So when you go for the low-hanging fruit first, you are satisfying general optimization principles. I see no reason to believe that these artists were analyzing their art in the context of making it look good on a CRT rather than just making it look good, with the CRT being an incidental tool. I would imagine that most of this art was probably developed on paper before it was programmed, and most corrections thereafter were applied only to fix glaring mistakes. It's quite a stretch for someone to claim that this is processes intentionally took CRTs into account during the design, or that CRTs naturally make this style of art look 'better.' CRTs might provide some quirky nostalgia, but I don't buy it that we're somehow missing out on the 'intended' experience by not using them. That's just moral preening unless we've got an industry artist willing to detail the actual process they used and support the claim. (Like someone is trying to tell my burritos aren't 'authentic Mexican' enough to taste good.)

Retra 8y ago

They designed on CRTs, not for them. There's a subtle difference. Imagine I'm trying to optimize a computer program. If I do it on machine A, then I'm optimizing on A, but only for A if I pay particular attention to the architecture of A to drive optimization decisions. On the other hand, if I'm making high-level optimizations -- like using more efficient data structures -- I'm still optimizing, but my program will still run just as fast in other environments, because the specific optimizations I'm doing aren't special features of machine A. So when you go for the low-hanging fruit first, you are satisfying general optimization principles. I see no reason to believe that these artists were analyzing their art in the context of making it look good on a CRT rather than just making it look good, with the CRT being an incidental tool. I would imagine that most of this art was probably developed on paper before it was programmed, and most corrections thereafter were applied only to fix glaring mistakes. It's quite a stretch for someone to claim that this is processes intentionally took CRTs into account during the design, or that CRTs naturally make this style of art look 'better.' CRTs might provide some quirky nostalgia, but I don't buy it that we're somehow missing out on the 'intended' experience by not using them. That's just moral preening unless we've got an industry artist willing to detail the actual process they used and support the claim. (Like someone is trying to tell my burritos aren't 'authentic Mexican' enough to taste good.)