I certainly appreciate the shout-out to the artists and designers from the era, These techniques were bent, twisted, and pulled in every way a development team could to produce artistic results that in some case genuine “moments” worth remembering while playing a game.

I remember being at a friends house while working on my masters thesis and him telling me to take a break and try out Halo. I had not had a console since the Nintendo 64 came out. I booted Halo and was literally mesmerized when I came out of a tunnel onto the Halo and saw the sky and the landmass. I can still remember that afternoon 20+ years later. Bought an Xbox the next morning.

Current game devs, especially in the AAA space, spend a lot of time and effort looking for hyper realism and embracing new tech to achieve accurate PBR. I wonder whether the limitations of the older hardware force a more artistic stance on everyone, even down to technical artists, to embrace an art style and art direction and work to achieve attractiveness vs realism. Or I could just be seeing my early 20’s through rose-tinted glasses.