> whether old games were intended to be seen on CRTs, or intended to be seen on LCD screens created years later. A lot of older games were designed on grid pap

> whether old games were intended to be seen on CRTs, or intended to be seen on LCD screens created years later. A lot of older games were designed on grid paper or workstations, not on the consoles or homecomputer that were running them later on. Just look at all the NES and SNES games with broken aspect ratio (i.e. circles not being round), that's not rare outliers, but like half of the library. Also the CRT vs LCD comparison are extremely disingenuous to begin with, since you are not supposed to be so f'n close to the TV to begin with. If you watch a game at its intended viewing distance and screen size your eyeballs will smooth out the LCD picture just the same as they would a CRT. If you sit close enough to see the shadow mask of your CRT, you are using it wrong. While I agree that the pixel-art look is drastically overdone in modern retro games, it's not like it didn't exist back in the day. Most old hardware had sprite or layer scaling that allowed you to enlarge the image. The Pokemon in the battle screen on GameBoy for example are all heavily pixelated, so are many SNES games that make use of Mode7 or the enemy sprites in games like AstroBot on GBA. Meanwhile most of the C64 library uses a mode that requires pixels be twice as wide as tall, which also makes everything look blocky. In PC gaming most of this didn't matter to begin with, since the monitors where capable of far sharper and higher resolution images than your average TV, much like a LCDs, while most of the early games where still doing 320x200. So things did end up look blocky even on original hardware. That's not to say that CRTs don't have benefits, the motion clarity is much better than sample-and-hold/full-persistance LCDs and LCD scaling gets incredible ugly when it's not a integer multiple of the original resolution and colors/vibrancy of early LCD was also horrible. But most of those are slowly going away with black-frame insertion, 4k resolution and HDR. And yes, sometimes you come across a Sonic waterfall that is designed to specifically take advantage of CRT TVs, but those effects are pretty rare.