This doesn’t square with the idea that they optimized for cheap TVs, with rectangular pixels.
The first games might have been checked paper sketches and might not have been so CRT optimized.
Even in the eighties, nothing prevented a Nintendo game developing team from using Amiga (or PC) Deluxe Paint for drawing the graphics. (They had also other specialized systems in Japan for pixeling graphics.)
No one designed differently for monochrome monitors with higher resolutions, or for the nascent LCD technologies of the day either. Every single article that says what this article says is literally just inventing a story.
> we know that many developers, graphic designers as well as programmers, used that technique, from Kazuko Shibuya (Square) and Akira Yasuda (Capcom) to the developers behind Thunder Force IV (1992) who used many CRTs to take into account the specifities of each kind of screen.
> “It’s a technique where by slightly changing the color of surrounding pixels, to the human eye it looks like the pixels move by around 0.5 pixels.” explains Kazuhiro Tanaka, graphic designer on Metal Slug (1996). His colleague Yasuyuki Oda adds that "Back in the old days, we'd say [to our artists] "add 0.5 of a pixel", and have them draw in the pixels by taking scanlines into account. But with the modern Full HD monitor, the pixels comes out too clearly and too perfectly that you can't have that same taste."
Even if they didn't explicitly take the tv properties into account, they drew the graphics on CRTs and saw it running on the target machine. And then adjusted it so it looked "better". Even intuitively.
They did that because it was quicker and easier, not out of a specific intention to make better-fitting art, but it had that effect anyway. The pics of Dracula and FF6 Siren from the post--there's no way someone plotted those on graph paper before importing them with no changes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=niKblgZupOc
Developers did definitly took advantages of everything they could to show more colors on the screen, remember all those demos?
Just because someone drafted some pixel art on paper doesn't mean that this must be the final form, and that no revision may ever be done.
And with recorded music in particular: Yeah, a good studio usually has a variety of monitors. Some might be exquisitely flat and unnvervingly detailed, some might be capable of effortlessly reaching big-stage PA levels, and some might resemble common consumer gear more than anything else.
If it works well with all of these, then: It might be considered a good mix.
The Yamaha NS-10 is/was a popular speaker in studios not because it was good, but because it represented a common medium-size bookshelf-ish speaker that people might actually use at home where they listened to music, and it was consistent betwixt different studio spaces.
To make drawing on actual hardware work, you either used battery-backed memory, or you used a connection to a PC.
and the counterexample is easy: the gameboy launched with LCD screens and games definitely where meant to look blocky. The pokemon games are perhaps the most influential nowadays in terms of pixelart style and show all examples of it: the very blocky styles of the overhead view and the more detailed pictures of the pokemon. They also cover the 8-bit and 16-bit era with the gameboy advance.
Devs design games to look good on the target platform. Obviously you can achieve gradient effects with a CRT and 16-bit color that are very different from a four-tone LCD. Both things can be true.
Edit: And some of them did that very deliberately and documented it. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41134689
> blocky pixel art often is a kind of misdirected, anachronistic nostalgia.
and my point was that blocky pixel art is a faithful representation of an important percentage of games of the era, even though some other games of the era were not meant to be "blocky" many indeed where as the gameboy proves.
Nope.
And your gameboy examples are not counter points to the fact that games were designed around a target screen limitation. They weren't designed around a CRT quirk, but they were designed around their own LCD quirk instead.
The first gameboy's screen was painfully bad, with a lot of ghosting during movement.
It was exploited in various way in games :
https://nerdlypleasures.blogspot.com/2018/03/compatibility-i...
https://nerdlypleasures.blogspot.com/2019/05/screen-persiste...
There was even a game that exploited the screen of the original gameboy to achieve a transparency effect in a spirit (but not implementation) similar to how Sonic devs created transparency on CRTs on the genesis.
https://youtu.be/MytSySMUwv8?t=2892
In this case, artificial flickering doesn't look like flicker on the original gameboy screen because it had a lot of ghosting. But it looks terrible on an emulator. You don't get those effects playing the same games on a modern computer monitor.
The various gameboys, and even the advance, were not as crips as you remember them to be, their LCDs weren't particularly high quality stuff. None of the original pixel art of those times were meant to look the way they look on a modern high contrast, high luminance, high resolution LCD or OLED screens of today. It's particularly true as soon as movement is involved as the ghosting was intense and it was one of the weakness of early LCDs as a whole as even the best computer monitors that came out when LCDs started to show up on the market looked horrible in motion compared to a CRT or a Plasma. So, the pixel art era was never about looking at a crisp image.
And many gameboy games look very, very wrong when run crisply on an emulator. They absolutely weren't meant to look like this. That batman game showing massive flickering around water looked fine on the original gameboy hardware.
> blocky pixel art often is a kind of misdirected, anachronistic nostalgia.
And no, blocky pixel art is a faithful representation of an important percentage of games from the 8bit to 16bit generations.