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> Huge blocky pixel art never really looked that way in the first place

Some did. For instance, I played games like LucasArts adventure games and WarCraft 1 on a Mac with a Trinitron display, which faithfully showed the blocks in all their glory. I imagine the experience was similar for other PC games. Not all pixel art was made for NTSC TVs.

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The article even shows a screenshot from Link's Awakening, which was intended to be displayed on an LCD with sharp pixels.

Except that Game Boy games didn't look like that screenshot either. The point being that programmers and artists took advantage of the screens (be it a handheld LCD or CRT television) to compliment their artwork and achieve effects they couldn't pull off by their pixels alone.

One can see a Cg shader here that attempts to recreate the look of an actual Game Boy screen, complete with several characteristics including motion blur and contrast settings:

http://filthypants.blogspot.com/2013/04/customizing-harlequi...

Motion blur isn't relevant to static images, and Link's Awakening uses flip scrolling so most of the screen is static most of the time.

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