It makes it sound like artists sat down and specifically about colour bleed, and blurry edges, and designed the artwork while thinking about the mechanics of CRT monitors in an academic way.
In reality, every monitor was a CRT. They just drew what looked good on their development devices.
Oh you don't even know the half of it, believe me! That was not how it went back in the day.
While every monitor was indeed a CRT, the difference between composite, EGA (later VGA), and RF cable, TV and computer monitors were in fact quite visible.
You could draw perfectly good pixel art on a nice, well calibrated 14" computer monitor only to see the same graphics look like a blend of mouse excrements and frog barf on a PAL TV via RF cable.
In fact, artists needed to make sure their palette and graphics worked reasonably well on both PAL and NTSC devices (different resolutions, slightly different colours, etc.).
Some companies made good ports that worked- and looked well on both PAL and NTSC, while many games had terrible PAL versions.
Lack of knowledge of any specific part could mean anything from muddy graphics to a bug in the retail version of the game in a time when there was literally no way to patch a game after release. Those bugs could ruin a company.
Single red pixels bleed into each other, creating eyes that span multiple pixels. It's an incredible effect.
And yes, at least in some cases, designers very carefully took into consideration how the art would look on a CRT via composite, in contrast to how they saw it on the high end monitors they were designing on via RGB.
Here are two of the designers of the original Sonic the Hedgehog games discussing the point:
https://twitter.com/MegaDriveShock/status/139046602041917849...
Vector games look atrocious in modern monitors, but beautiful in vector monitors. Developers couldn't know what monitors the future would have, but they certainly designed for the monitors of their time and counted with their quirks in their visual effects.
IIRC, the developer of the 2600 VCS version of Pac-Man decided that the ghosts should display 1 of every 4 frames not because it looked well in his monitor, but because he was running out of time and relied on phosphor persistence to mask his sprite reuse hack.
Edit: The correct VCS Pac-Man story of the flickery ghosts https://boards.fool.com/atari-2600-hardware-and-pac-man-2527...
Are you saying that people are saying that artists back then didn't use monitors, and had to imagine what their art would look like?
Odds are high that things were varied considerably. Such that it is tough to really claim too much.
Edit: as the follow-up shows. Down res and cleanup probably works better than folks are allowing in the conversations. With the major caveat that the "and cleanup" is tough to automate.
They didn't have to 'think about how it'd look on a consumer TV', as that's probably what they were developing on.
During the era of 16-bit console development, the Amiga (with DPaint - which was never as good on PC) was still a popular pixel art tool. And even if you had a monitor, you could easily preview things on a TV too.
Nobody is suggesting pixel art was an advanced form of alchemy, they are saying many artists understood techniques or why their printed pixel art for a presentation would look one way while their digital version looked another way
Or are you suggesting that artists of that era never looked at their art on CRTs at all?
At most, it might mean artists perhaps tried to increase color contrast between pixels a bit, to compensate for known blur. But on the other hand, they were usually working with a limited color palette so that kind of subtle adjustment often wouldn't even be possible -- the colors just are what they are.
The preference to blur 8-bit video games on modern systems is totally valid, or to even try to emulate actual CRT characteristics, but so is the preference not to. It's an entirely aesthetic preference that doesn't really have anything to do with original "design intent".
And then stuff like this (from the article) is just ridiculous:
> Look at how much detail you're missing when youre only looking at the raw pixels. Richter's hair is barely visible! Look at how much clearer his boots read as leather on the right!
Color contrast (the hair) has nothing to do with pixellation and everything to do with different overall gamma, contrast, and brightness of the display -- which you can customize on your modern display to your heart's content. I guarantee you "Richter's hair" was "barely visible" on plenty of CRT's as well.
And I don't know about you, but his legs/boots read equally skin/leather to me in both images. But I guess you can see anything you want if you're motivated to...
True, but there was a huge difference between a good-quality RGB monitor and a consumer TV connected via composite video or RF. Ideally designers would have been using development devices that took that difference into account.
For example, I've heard of artists at Sega drawing on PCs and using custom hardware so they could simultaneously view their work on a real Genesis connected to a typical TV.