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Comment by aout | Hacker News Reader

During that time, Nintendo knew how to work with game studios. The color palette is one of the most powerful examples I remember, it encompasses the technical and the artistic domains, developers and designers. With the SNES they got even further by adding composition in a way that was incredibly intuitive. Glad you produced this article. So much memories.

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> it encompasses the technical and the artistic domains

these days, the amount of knowledge required in those two domains are such that no one person can be an expert in both ( at least,for a non-genius!). Think about 3D artists, and think about people who write the pipeline and tools etc for them - one does not know anything about the other really. I wish there's a way to simplify it all so that modern games can be made just as "simple" and intuitive as the old 2D bitmapped graphics.

True, but today's studios need the proper APIs and hardware to produce the games people want. Nintendo is failing to provide such basis for development and that's one its biggest mistakes.

Funny thing about the NES palette is it's actually spectacularly poorly chosen. It has no yellow and dedicates 10 entries to black.

Source: http://www.thealmightyguru.com/Games/Hacking/Wiki/index.php?...

> dedicates 10 entries to black

I highly doubt this is because it was "poorly chosen" - it seems this must be due to some sort of technical limitation.

The color limitations of the NES made it look so dated so quickly. The resolution isn't much lower than the SNES but there are so few colors available compared to the 32,768 colors of the SNES.

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