Pixel Art Wars: Are Modern Games Misusing the Classic Aesthetic? 

Something I haven't seen anyone talk about so far is the game boy and its successors Game boy color used LCD Even the original green game boy used LCD screens Non blurred pixel games have been around for a while

I don't like when pixel art is seen as only a retro aesthetic, it's its own entire medium of different art styles now

The first mistake that guy made in his video was assume that all modern pixel art is trying to emulate the past and not just be its own thing

You can't say "Art is wrong", pixel art is not called CRT art for a reason

he had a really weird example with shovel knight and arguing against outlines, when one of the most popular pixel art sprites is the original megaman idle sprite which not only has a big bold outline, but also zero shading

Modern pixel art can have more pixel density and higher resolution than retro games. This can be used to emulate a CRT smoothing effect on a modern display or make sprites that are far more detailed than previous generations.

I find the outline argument amusing, just ignoring massively well-known and well-loved games like Yoshi's Island and Kirby Super Star.

That first wave of Nintendo box art was a North American thing. The originals used their hand drawn arts in most cases in Japan. The reasoning is most likely because when Nintendo broke in, they did their research to know that the Atari crash in NA had deeply soured most people's impression of games. Between terrible gameplay, and lets say 'generous' box art that looked nothing like gameplay, Nintendo made the first gen, first party NES games intentionally gave specific and mostly accurate impressions of what graphics were going to look like on the screen.

I don't think all modern pixel art games just use pixels because of nostalgia, instead, I think they are evolving the art form in a lot of interesting ways. Sure you have something like Shovel Knight and Curse of the Moon where the devs are obviously replicating the 8 bit aesthetic, but then you have Blasphemous, or Celeste, or Hyper Light Drifter with completely different art styles yet they are all pixel art at the end of the day.

This argument, and especially how they love to say "always" and "never", completely falls apart when you go back before the SNES and especially before the NES. Atari games had enormous pixels, and if any of them were "smoothed out" you wouldn't be able to see characters' eyes or limbs or etc

As a pixel artist this is such an annoying argument lmao. Both are good, appreciate both.

Such a strange thing to gatekeep. When I was making pixel art on my computer back in 2001 I was well aware the sprites on my monitor were more crisp than the ones on my TV, and I happened to like the crisp look better. Just let people have fun and make art; compared to most forms of art, pixel art is really still in its infancy. It's fun to explore everything you can do with it, CRT or no.

There is no such thing as a "false nostalgia". The argument could be made that it may be an unintended nostalgia, but if that is what you're nostalgic for then that is just as valid as the "real nostalgia".

The idea that all pixel art games were supposed to look the same stylistically is very funny. As if pixel art wasn't a format but simply a single style in itself. Imagine if people today said that God of War Ragnarok and Hi-Fi Rush (rip) looked the same stylistically simply because both games use high resolution textures and big polygon counts completely discounting the fact that both games go for fundamentally completely different style.

The confusing thing to me about the whole "it was designed for CRTs" thing is... how do these people think these graphics would have been made differently if they were designed for displays with sharp pixels? Like, I kinda get it when we're talking about dithering or something, but that SMRPG Peach sprite doesn't have anything special going on. It's not "designed for CRTs". It's a prerendered 3D graphic that's been shrunk down and color-reduced (and probably touched up a bit for details like the eyes) to meet the SNES hardware restrictions. The graphics would have been made the same way even if everyone was using LCD TVs back then.

I take umbrage to the gunvolt critique especially, since gunvolt is done in a style commonly seen on GBA and original DS, which did not blend the colors or create any sort of softness. Additionally, using 16-bit sprites to critique sprites emulating an 8-bit system is disingenuous. Go look at old mega man sprites and you find that the CRT didn't really change how those sprites looked, and it's Mega Man that Shovel Knight is specifically referencing. EDIT: Not to mention, his two examples are more likely than not straight up digitized art. Of course they blend more than others! Peach was a prerendered model scanned to images and downscaled to 16x24, and the Crono profile is more than likely the same, a Toriyama drawing digitized and downscaled. If he wants to complain about characters in shovel knight, he should be comparing them to actual hand made character sprites

The castlevania example is especially bad because the series continued to use the same pixel art style even when their games weren't being displayed on crts.

The idea that ALL pixel art is trying to emulate classic retro games and that ALL pixel art games should be played on a CRT display is a really narrow and highly objective point of view.

It reminds me of the 4:3 vs 8:7 arguments for the SNES, and which was the "right" way to do it. People pointed especially to games like Megaman X, where circles became ovals in 8:7 display. What a lot of people were forgetting is that on CRTs, we had a nob that allowed you to stretch or squash the horizontal image, and neither were how we played it. Some artists adjusted for the presumed stretch, and some didn't. You had to take it on a game-by-game basis.

My simple rebuttal for these sorts of arguments; All the Gameboys. I've been working with sprites for 20 years now, and I do love the CRT effect, especially on 64-bit era 3D games, but you can like both, no one filter is "better" than another.

The thing that is so sad about that clip is the unquestioned assumption that high-contrast and blocky (pixels) looks bad and is a mistake, and low contrast and curved/rounded (heavy anti-aliasing) looks good and is 'correct.' It's like he only sees pixel art as having merit due to the nostalgia of it being accurate to the SNES or something, when it's my favorite art style even putting aside all of retro gaming. Artists didn't have to 'design around CRTs to make it look smooth,' the nature of scan lines is that they will automatically create that effect on any pixel art, designed for it or not. The idea that on such short development times and small teams, they were painstakingly applying a CRT filter on the pixel perfect grid after finishing every single sprite they drew, and making changes based on that when even things like whether the scanlines of the TV are on the even or odd lines would make more of a difference to the actual image, is crazy to me. There are even some screenshots of Shovel Knight with a scanline filter which look very similar to the Castlevania examples. Most of my retro game playing as a kid (NES mainly) was done near-sighted without glasses, so I rarely even noticed the CRT effect because it was so blurry already. When I first replayed some of those games with 1:1 sprites on emulator, I thought they looked so impossibly crisp and clean. Those experiences are what inspired me to make a bit of pixel art of my own. The blockiness of it is actually what makes it superior to typical analogue artforms to me. Because you get to work with the atoms of the work itself, every bit is under your control. I think on some level, he's using scanlines to try and erase a perceived flaw and 'analogue-ize' the digital pixel art, when he's actually just erasing the one thing that makes pixel art as a medium unique, in order to make it just like everything else.

Pixel art is often interesting for the same reason certain other artistic mediums are, it's not just nostalgia. There is novelty in something that is greater than the sum of its parts, something made within the restrictions of a limited medium. It's one of the reasons why things like Lego models and Minecraft builds are often so compelling.

6:47 This is what GameBoy Color/GameBoy Advance artwork generally looked like. The bold outline stood out against the background on these small screens and the high contrast was necessary because these consoles had no backlight. I imagine that more people experienced this kind of unblurred pixel art on handheld consoles than they experienced CRT-blurred console games.

I think the biggest issue with this argument is that a lot of people are trying to look at this as an absolute rather than on a game-by-game basis, when it just isn't. Plenty of devs tried to use the CRT to make things look nicer, plenty of devs.. Didn't. And it only becomes more nonsensical when you consider we live in an age where most people who play pixel art games are going to be doing it through a digital display and not an analog or CRT one. I doubt a lot of devs are optimizing their games for a display format that most people don't have access to let alone regularly use.

This is a classic example of cherry picking. He used examples that supported his argument: Super Mario RPG, Chrono Trigger, Symphony of the Night (still to this day LOVE the effect that CRT blurring has on Dracula's eyes in his portrait) Completely ignoring all the dozens of examples of games that DON'T do that. The vast vast majority of NES titles did not do it. Earthbound is an example of an SNES game that definitely did not do it. Those kids are polygonal as heck, and have very clearly defined outlines even on a CRT. Then he picked a game, Shovel Knight, that was attempting to emulate the NES era style of pixel art and then zooming in on the sprites to an unreasonable degree, nitpicking details that are intended to be viewed on modern screens/monitors at high resolutions, and then picking a game, River City Girls, that is going for an HD anime style, and not trying to emulate SNES graphics 1 for 1. Pixel art is a medium and just like any medium, it has an entire spectrum of art within it. Some of it was intended to be viewed on a CRT, some of it was done due to technical limitations forcing the artists to get creative, some of it is just the way it is, because that's the way it is.

Games being primarily made of pixels was the very reason other games like Donley Kong Country, Mario RPG, and Yoshi's Island stood out and praised so highly for their graphics. I don't think these games would be nearly as remembered today if every single game was styled around a CRT display.

6:49 That guy just used some random person’s fetish art from deviantart for an example. That’s just straight up disgusting.

There were games that did visual tricks using CRT that kind of lose their effect when viewed on modern monitors, but for him to say that every game was painstakingly handcrafted in such a way is just straight up wrong.

Emulation itself is retro. Emulation of popular Nintendo platforms began in 1997. The people who made sprite sheets did so with the assistance of emulation tools. Now let's talk about 1997 display hardware. You had a VGA monitor, and the emulators ran in a 240 scanline mode. The 240 scanline mode was implemented in a way where each scanline gets displayed twice, making the pixels chunky. And VGA monitors had a perfect RGB signal, so the horizontal direction is not fuzzy or blurred at all. This is the opposite of how things were on TVs, where each scanline is displayed once, and the composite video signal is naturally very fuzzy.

oh i saw that TikTok, is kinda wild how he managed to be wrong in pretty much every aspect Starting from end to start: - Azure striker Gunvolt is a DS game, made by the studio that made the Megaman Zero games. They made the sprites specifically for an LCD screen with a backlight (the GBA color limitation would only apply to Zero 1 & even by then the Frontlight models would be out) - River City Girls is not even trying to emulate a retro style, they're imitating Kay-Yu's art style (minus the impressively animated & impressively big boobas) wich you can also see in "HoloCure: Save the Fans" & "Holo x Break (the X is silent)" - YatchClub have confirmed they based the Shovel knight art style on NES Megaman & DuckTales - Game Developers have access to the same screens as modern artists, so yeah they would also design for LCDs & OLEDs once the turn of the Millennium hit - the whole "CRT emulates hand drawn" only applies to Square RPG games, most developers accounted for the Pixel art being Pixel art, if anything Early 3D used the CRT's natural anti-aliasing effect way more - also, this guy is presenting the screenshots in a level of zoom you wouldn't actually see - finally, CRTs were surprisingly inconsistent, AND we know what the games did look pixely on 90's CRT because of gaming magazines - as for that Original tweet? Yeah CRTs are awful for productivity

People acting like the entirety of pre-HD games were played on the exact same brand of CRT that supposedly every household had with the exact same cables. I had some shitty ass off brand one with shitty ass composite cables, the TRUE way to play games right? It definitely blended colours. Not to mention, a lot of artists from pre-HD era... still make sprites!... and for the most part, changed nothing at all in their creative process, despite knowing their art will be seen on a modern display. At the end of the day, if it look good, it look good and yeah, modern pixel art look good.

This is also a matter of a timeline. The "utilizing the limitations of CRT to its benefit" techniques was something that came quite late, and is something you saw primarily during the 16-bit era. If you look at the 8-bit era, it flat-out was not a thing in the overhwelmingly vast majority of cases, and it is no mistake that he shows 16-bit games to support his argument, while you show 8-bit games to counter it.

I spent most of my youth playing pixel games on the Game Boy rather than an NES or SNES on a CRT monitor, so when I saw people were basically trying to tell me "Oh no, modern pixel art is based on false nostalgia because it was supposed to look blurry" I was just like *stares in Pokemon, Kid Dracula, Final Fantasy Adventure, Super Mario Land 2, and countless other examples proving you wrong* In fact, I DID play many of those games on CRTs with the Super Game Boy attachment and found they looked noticeably worse on the TV.

What is the point of criticizing Shovel Night for not using art techniques that would make the game theoretically look better on a CRT display when the game was designed to be viewed on a LCD display?

A lot of younger people are talking when they weren’t even there lol. The average TV at a time in the mid to late 90s was about 19” as I recall, sometimes even smaller if you couldn’t afford anything bigger/had older displays, and things like pixels didn’t exist on actual CRT TVs, as we had scan lines. The term pixel is short for “picture element” and we started seeing them more on modern LCD TVs as time went on. These games were made to support different standards, too (NTSC, PAL, etc) and the artists did the best they could with what they had. It’s factually correct to say that some artists did their best to take advantage of scan lines as demonstrated in that TikTok video, but yeah, Shesez is right in that each artist had their own intentions and art styles. Environments and assets were pixelated as a consequence of how they were made, and had to be made. Go look at actual media uncompressed from that time on a CRT and you’ll notice a lack of pixels compared to video games. I watched games go from NES to SNES and Genesis, then to 3D. The intention was always to look better than the other guy. We started seeing more detail as we went from 8 bit to 16 bit, then to 3D geometry. I’m in a group where people collect CRTs and they’ll tell you that it’s the best, and there’s no lag, and that’s how the graphics were intended (especially with N64 games and the anti aliasing) and I sure agree that the games look better on there, but CRT technology isn’t superior by any factual metric and a lot of people have this nostalgia for that bygone era that clouds their judgement on the actual facts. It’s really just subjective, a matter of preference. The truth is that modern games and pixel art wasn’t designed with anything close to our resolutions and panel technology in mind. That’s why we see a lot of imperfections on our 50+” OLED 4K TVs, but that’s not a great way to say, “well look! The older stuff looks this way on newer TVs, now look on it on my scan line emulator/upscaler/RGB connection that literally no one used when the game was new and you’ll get to see EXACTLY what the artist intended.” It kinda creates a false equivalency, that’s my point. Pixel art is art. Art is subjective. A lot of the “purists” out there either weren’t there/over hyping their nostalgia/doing a lot of gatekeeping. The truth is each developer did the best they could with what they had. We’re fortunate enough to still have that art style existing in today’s world. Some artists will be designing this art on big, modern displays and not on sprite sheets. Some will opt to get as much of an old timey feel as they can. Others will be trying to have bright colors that pop, and making playable cartoons. Everyone is going to have their own interpretation and intentions. None of them are wrong. The only wrong thing to say imho is that someone’s art “…shouldn’t look like that because I think I know what some Japanese artist crammed in an office back in the 80s or 90s was thinking…” It’s a silly argument. Even Shovel Knight, which was intended to use the color palette and limitations that developers had with the NES, wouldn’t actually worked on a NES in its final form. It was as close as they could make it without sacrificing their vision.

Gatekeeping pixel art is the dumbest thing I've seen in a while.

This feels like it is taking the flawed "one size fits all" mentality is applying the same faulty logic of another absolute. Most games did or series eventually did understand how CRTs work. It took time to nurture it. This is why early games did not manage to pull off those effects. Look at early Mega Man on NES to how it wound up in 6. Cartoons using the "pixelated" style was actually to make sure it was obvious it was meant to be a video game. It was based on things that were quite limited on what they could do, like donkey kong. A lot of games after were getting better, just like how 3D improved. And the worst thing is he is right... when it comes to retro we are doing it wrong because people are nostalgic for that kind of pixel art. The issue is he is trying to invalidate the blocky look people are choosing to do based on aesthetic, not retro. Granted some companies do push these too hard as retro... but ah well. And it's not like all pixel artists try to go for this blocky style. Touhou Luna Nights is a game that tries to smooth out its pixels and keep them darker than you see on an old SNES game. birdman46049238 is an amazing pixel artist who's work is smooth as can be. Pixel art can be made smooth these days. As for the gunvolt example... that game was originally made for low res handheld... it does not look that blocky on the 3DS, which already had a somewhat blurry screen. Compare that to GV3 and the way that pixel art looks as well. It's no where as blocky and without the thick outlines. GBA games... people really need to try playing them on a GBA and see how the small screen kind of blended things together. Really the issue is we should be saying that people can make pixel art however they want but also people should acknowledge most games past the midlife of NES were taking advantage of the CRT. Just like all art, pixel art had improved with knowledge. We should not reject what we had.

I grew up around pixel art purists. It held me back a TON. fuck any kind of art feuds. It's all subjective. Taste is subjective. It's ok to want to make pixel art with CRT in mind. It's ok to make pixel art with LED in mind. It's okay to appreciate either or, or both. I grew up with the notion that using certain brush types was ""cheating."" I'm looking at you, Pixel Joint. They only value things done in a specific way. Which whatever. Everyone can have their preferences.... But if it didn't hold me back SO badly back then. LED allows us to appreciate things more on a pixel art level. This is so stupid

"big blocky frame, high contrast colors and big black outlines aren't authentic..." Super Mario Bros 3: "Am I a joke to you?"

I was an art major and I loved pixel art late 90s and early 2000s and I can say the professional forums I was in never once considered the crt factor

Why is this even a debate? It’s an aesthetic that has evolved from its original purpose. Sure sometimes it’s used as a way to make a game feel “retro”, but other times it’s used to better fit a game’s style. Sometimes the style is simply more appealing to the developers who are making their game. Hell, sometimes developers ARE actually limited to pixel resolutions when it comes to some engines like RPG Maker and such. People that complain that pixel art doesn’t look good when not on CRT screens or stuff similar really just aren’t aware of the idea that not all games with pixel art style are supposed to be “retrobait.”

It's also important to remark that the blur you see in some of those screenshots comes not only from the CRT, but in fact mostly the Composite/S-Video signals that these consoles utilized. This is why arcade games didn't often play with this blur to it's advantage: they couldn't even do it, cause they used RGB signals, which were much clearer. It's also why the pixels were very noticeable in that Richter Belmont image, it was ran through an RGB cable.

Some games benefit from a CRT, some games were limited by it. Mega Man on NES looks better sharp, Mega Man X on SNES looks better smoothed. CRT’s came in all sorts of different mask shapes and blending amounts, not to mention the type of video cable you used for your console had a major impact on how the game would be displayed. My favorite retro visual quirk is dithering, when playing ps1 games on a crt you would never see it, but bust out a psp and both ps1 games and psp games alike are covered in it and it looks delightful imo, like seeing the canvas texture of a painting. There has never been one true way for these games to look, there’s always been variety and that’s awesome.

it's case-by-case, some accounted for artifacts, some didn't, just like not all games accounted for ntsc stretching

I agree with you. I think this guy does a good job of pointing out that a CRT did have a unique blending effect that made some games look amazing. I remember as a kid thinking that Sonic 1 and 2 on the Genesis were 3D games thanks to the amazing art work and the fact that I was playing it on a 10-12 inch CRT, but then we were given a 30-inch or so CRT and I realized it was just really good pixel art. Aladdin on the Genesis, however, was clearly pixels. Maybe the guy just only ever saw these games on a smaller CRT.

6:57 id like to see this sprite displayed on a CRT, actually i feel like the colors might blend quite nicely. The rpg guy in the tiktok would have a stronger argument if he could present these modern sprites actually not looking good on a CRT

What do people who believe this think about pixel art that wasn't displayed on CRTs? Do they forget all the handheld consoles that have used pixel art without CRT screens?

I like how in a portion of the video it shows your pixel art face in the background. 👾

True man. The whole crt way is true way is so dump. I play so many arcade fighting game and sprite itself is already super good looking and sometime having details blured due to crt

As someone who grew up with the Game Boy, Game Boy Color, Game Boy Advance, and Nintendo DS I'd like to point out they used LCDs.

Where it shows that he is blatantly wrong in his exemples of "false nostalgia " is the gunvot one, who is clearly based on gba pixel art (speceficly the megaman zero series and the megaman zx series on ds from wich the developpers used to work on)that USED lcd

Funnily enough, the NES didn't allow enough colors per tile/sprite to do any of that kind of blending on CRTs. You needed the expanded palettes and on screen colors of the 16 bit generation to pull off those kinds of effects. What gives the NES its distinct style is developers learned to emphasize shadow and negative space since there was almost always a lot of black on screen. The best looking NES games blackout a lot of environmental details. Shovel Knight emulated this fantastically

I just don't get how were in an age where retro games can be viewed in any way we choose, including the screens they were designed for, where young artists saw the limitations of the time and saw an oppurtunity to expand that limitation into a genuine artform, and some see this as a _bad_ thing?! Aren't video games a player driven medium? Since when did we become so hyperfocused on the "artistic vision" of the creator when some of the most interesting things about old games are the ways we can *break* that immersion? I understand preserving information about the development process behind these games. It's amazing to hear all the tricks developers used at the time to make their games truly look a step above. But why does it need to be marred with this anti-millenial sentiment? as if it's 2000's kids fault for using methods infinitely more accessible than a decade old console on a near century old display. I'm 100% sure young gamers today (like me) would accept that crt was how games looked back then, even looked better back then, if the people sharing this information weren't poisoning the well of emulators and indie artists. Video game history is fun, shit flinging contests aren't.

While it may be a little unfair to say that modern pixel art is mistakenly emulating a style that never existed, I do agree that art designed to be viewed on on a CRT is often best viewed in the medium it was intended for

Speaking as someone who was a kid who played on both consoles on CRT and on PC emulators on an LCD, I have a high appreciation for viewing classic pixel art in both formats. EDIT: Also, what about handhelds? while the Game Boy and Game Gear screens did have significant ghosting, for the most part you were viewing some pretty raw pixels, especially in RPGs like Pokemon where you had a static image on screen for an extended period of time.

I love both!! Whats really trippy is pixel art shown as 2D, but is actually 3D models so they can change colors easily and have it apply across animations.

Twitter crying about a non-issue? I'm shocked.

I think that some people do have "perfect pixel/scaled perfect pixel" nostalgia, but its for games from gba and 8-32 bit console emulators. So its nostalgia from a slightly different time. However I think pixel art in itself is a valid way to animate a modern game, and options for crt filters and other blending options give a decent amount of artistic flexibility to the deveopers.

Donkey Kong country was the first game I noticed the crt filter on the snes mini made the game look better. The entire screen with the amazing prerendered art assests was so much easier to interpret and appreciate.

Not everyone in the world had shitty CRT screens using composite video cables that blur the image. I grew up in France where SCART was the standard video cable consoles used to connect to a CRT TV and the pixels looked sharp. It's fine to personally prefer the softened look but to say that we're wrong to prefer crisp pixels is to deny us our non-american experiences with old games. Not to mention handheld games from the gameboy to the PSP have always displayed their pixel art graphics on sharp looking LCD screens.

Jesus Christ, no, I love having my pixels nice and sharp. Most people do not want CRT filters.

I don't think it's a matter of "those are the exception, the rule is blocky sprites". It depends of the game's art style. When it comes to SNES games, then Super Metroid, the Donkey Kong Country trilogy, Super Mario RPG, Chrono Trigger, Contra III, and many other games have an art style that try to convey detailed, well-shaded shapes. In this case, the CRT does wonders to round out the contrast and make those shapes less blocky. But then games like Super Mario World, Earthbound, Yoshi's Island, A Link to the Past and others have art styles that have very clear outlines and decisively embrace the "blockiness" of pixel art. In this case, nearest neighbor scaling brings the best out of these sprites. When it comes to other consoles the story can change. PS1 games (the ones that have pixel art at least) look better with a CRT or a CRT filter 99% of the time, while NES games look better with nearest neighbor scaling on an LCD 99% of the time. At the same time it really bothers me that some people think that just because many old games use the CRT to their advantage that doing otherwise is somehow "wrong" in any shape or form Yeah I disagree with everyone here lol

If you played a Gameboy or Gameboy advance the pixel art looks just like modern pixel art. I’m an 80s kid and grew up on a crt and can’t handle crt filters. The clean look is so much better in my opinion.

I don't think they're misusing it. "Modern" pixels look good.

Thank you because I see a lot of game "critics" spew that kind of garbage.

It's PIXEL ART style, not necessarily OLD GRAPHICS style. But! I love to play my old games emulated with a good modern CRT filter on. Exactly as I remember.

Example of details getting blurred out because of CRT? This was mentioned a few times but I would like to see one

Thank you for injecting some nuance into this topic. As an amateur pixel artist with a strong preference for the "CRT purist" aesthetic, it's also blatantly obvious that pixel art and pixel graphics were not exclusively styles for that "bloom" effect from the CRTs. Some artists just worked really well within that limitation. A great example of pixel graphics being used outside of that blooming would be every single handheld gaming device up through the 2010s.

I hate how it's always boiled down to "this is how it looked on a CRT!" Okay but what kind of cable are you using? High quality cables will very clearly still show pixels. Most effects people refer to in this conversation are only visible through rf and composite

This video is like "yeah some animation had perspective and volume like Dragon ball or One piece but there was also peppa pig and south park"

One important aspect missing here is the discussion of video signals. Back in the early 90s it made a huge difference to the end results wether you used a RF, Composit, RGB or VGA cable. I think the waterfalls in Sonic is still the most famous example for this. In this day and age all video signals are digital, forcing us to rely on filters to recreate the analogue styles.

The goal of most modern pixel art games is to look how you remember retro games, not actually emulate exactly how they were. Even Shovel Knight, which is very faithful to the original style, has many quality of life features that weren't technologically possible back then. That fella is just incredibly ignorant, and unfortunately when someone is that loud with their opinion, they're never going to change it. I was a part of several releases and not a single sentence was spoken about CRTs at any point. And at least in my case, everything was made on LCD screens, and there wasn't remotely enough time to go back and forth checking how your work looked on another type screen.

So... is it weird that I like BOTH kinds of pixels? Like... I think with the Crono raw pixels VS CRT filtered example. Both have their charm to them.

There's a kernel of truth in that original video in that some modern pixel artists that claim to be retro inspired seem to misunderstand the design choices of older games when trying to replicate the look. But it ends there. Ignoring that EVEN BACK THEN the artstyle were varied and had different approaches to abstraction, the idea that pixel art is bound to imitate the past is fundamentally reductive. There's people who intentionally LEAN on the blockiness of the pixels, which is both a conscious AND valid artistic choice. Pixel art is art, and like any other art form it thrives with variety and diversity. So if someone is trying to imitate Chono Trigger, Megaman or Metal Slug that's great, but to think they're wrong for not adhering to the restrictions of 90's color displays is bonkers. Also, I don't care for your distate of Pixelart, G-man. Go do something else if all you're gonna do is try and say people are wrong for not viewing things YOUR way, because that's not healthy dialogue.

I started graphics on an Atari ST (16 bits computer from the 90s) with a CRT, never have it crossed my mind to use the blurryness of the CRT, all my graphicss where pixel tight and square in the hope of being displayed as is.

I like the thought experiment, it creates a nice opportunity for informative discussion and arguments. However like most dialogs on the internet that OP doesn't seem to be saying it for curiosity about the hypothesis but rather acting like The Source of Truth.

Big chunky pixels usually looked much clearer on CRT computer monitors than CRT TVs. There was perhaps a little fuzziness, but not nearly as much. So pixel art games intended to be displayed much more clearly than a CRT TV would ever display them have been around since the 80s.

Chrono triggwr actually did have anouther part that wasnt even mentioned. In the revealing shot of magus's lair if your looking it at the correct pixel size the moon for example it isnt round where crts were a diffrent screen so when seeing that scene on it the moon is actually to shape. But yeah the person is honestly clueless besides the ct and mario rpg

6:56 That example from Gunvolt seems to be the opposite of what he's claiming. It has some nicely placed shading, and aside from the cape's edges, looks pretty fantastic when smoothed out.

Thank you for making this. I had this guy blocked on TikTok for a long time now because he is VERY opinionated and LOVES to argue and is NEVER wrong. Because, he used to work in game design. What did he actually do? At the time I blocked him, he didn't actually say, but it meant he's right and everyone else is wrong, always. He reminds me a lot of Andrew Dobson/Tom Preston.

antialiasing is an entire practice in pixel art to try to create smoothness between colors. crts are not needed to make colors look smooth

I don't think the argument is that modern artists do it wrong, but rather that the style they're emulating didn't ever exist. That said, I would also disagree with that one. The CRT is absolutely smoothing out things, but as you pointed out it's still extremely obvious in 90% of games that they're pixels and blocky. Chrono Trigger is actually a nice example of this, because the portraits absolutely look way better on a CRT, but the regular sprites don't look that much better and different on a CRT. And he obviously completely ignored the NES, GB, GBC, GBA. Yeah, all of those also profitted either from CRT or in, the case of the handhelds, had some other factors that smoothed things out. But no one can honestly tell me that a game like the original Zelda or Super Mario Land look significantly different on modern displays in ways that would impact our remembering of the style.

Really balanced, thoughtful take. I think going forward we will see indie games with many different "styles" of pixel art with different inspirations and design choices, and it will be difficult to lump them all into easy, well-defined labels. We might already be there.

my take on Nostalgic CRT filters: We have wrongfuly atributed to Scanlines, what we need to get the effect is transparency blending & to crank up that anti-aliasing

I bought a PVM kind of on a whim and I've tried lots of different media on it (even DVDs) and I was blown away. Nothing compares to the quality of a professional CRT monitor. I understand the preference. If you're using a consumer CRT though, I'm guessing that's all nostalgia. That said, some (if not many, or all), game videogame designers worked on pro monitors, and those look so different from consumer CRTs (especially of the time) that it's hard to argue for "artists intent".

Alright, this is definitely a better breakdown. While I am on the side of "CRT looks better", when mylifeisanrpg used Richter as an example and said "his arm looks drawn on" I was thinking "Are you sure about that?" And ironically, there is a better example in SOTN in regards to portrait pictures! (The example of Dracula's portrait is a good one as it shows how the lone red pixel in his eye looks more like a red shine through a CRT.) And let's not forget even older games like those from the Atari 2600, the Intelevision had lower resolution outputs to the TV to the point it was _clearly_ blocky unless you were playing on a tiny screen! And as mentioned even on NES, which had a similar output resolution to the SNES, you could make out the pixels in some cases because you only had so many colors that blending was either very difficult or impossible! Maybe your CRT would blend dithered pixel art into the color the artist intended or maybe it wouldn't depending on the TV you were using and whether or not your NES was connected via RF or composite RCA. We're not really "mislead", we just simply don't know which games used CRT artifacts to their advantage or not. Like I mentioned, your console might've been hooked up differently from the developer. You had RF, composite, some consoles may have had S-Video, and some regions used SCART which is considered to be the cleanest connection. If you had your SNES connected via SCART, maybe Peach or Chrono would look more pixelated instead of hand-drawn. Not everyone used the same cable unlike today where it's all HDMI. (Or DisplayPort, but the differences there have no effect on my point.) We all probably saw the same game differently even back in the day!

This discussion has circled the drain essentially from the moment that 2D graphics started to be rendered on GPUs or through vector rendering engines(namely Flash). In that era the gatekeeping was not about the CRT, but about whether the graphics were in an appropriate context: with a high resolution display you could treat pixel art assets as a texture applied to a high-res rectangle, instead of conforming them to a single pixel grid. The problem with that argument is, you can find examples of "double-res" sprites on old hardware that have a similar kind of effect. On rare occasions you would see, for example, a SNES game that used the high-res modes, for example the menus in Seiken Densetsu 3. This would completely break early SNES emulators that tried to map everything to a low res display. A similar thing that has come up is the use of large palettes or shader effects on pixel assets. There is a stylistic reason to critique that, which is that it can make things less readable to sacrifice the clusters of single colors, since they add some definition to pixelled shapes. This concern was something that became evident as soon as the early 90's when games like King's Quest V started relying on a mix of digitized, but still low-res, paintings alongside hand-tuned pixels. But it is likewise a valid approach - at the time, digitizing was an efficient way to maximize usage of the larger 256 color palettes and get some more fidelity into your backgrounds. Pixels have always been a pragmatic concept and their uses are numerous.

Most of the pixel art I've experienced has been on handheld Nintendo consoles which have LCDs and therefore the images remain sharp. I do think early 3D games usually benefited from the anti-aliasing from CRT TVs, as N64 games looked worse on LCDs from my memory. I definitely appreciate how some artists on the SNES, Playstation, and MS-DOS were able to utilize CRTs to their advantage. But it's certainly not the only way it was used, and even games like Super Mario World 3 when ported to the GBA still looked good despite missing out on the CRT smoothing out the colored pencil art style.

I do agree that the idea that most pixel art was never made with CRT in mind. But I do agree some games look better with the CRT effect. I mentioned the game last time, but I'll bring it up again, but Moon RPG does a fantastic job at addressing the CRT issue by adding the filter in game as an option. I like that companies in general have been adding the blur effect to older games an option in an attempt to get that og feel to it. I think Moon does a great job though and honestly I played the whole game with that filter on. I wonder if Nintendo will ever consider adding it to the NES, SNES, and Genesis apps. Especially when the Gameboy App lets you select different color screens.

This isn't really about CRTs so much as 1) 240p on 15.5KHz displays which produces scanlines 2) composite video that is very bandwidth limited especially in chroma, which blurs things horizontally and 3) TVs with relatively large dot pitch creating more visible separation. But that doesn't apply the same to a lot of other contemporary low-resolution 2D games designed for computer monitors or to some extent arcade games. If you ever emulated SNES games on PCs with CRTs in the late 90s you'd see pictures that look a lot more like the LCD examples than what they're calling CRT imagery.

Even if every piece of artwork in games back then was not taking advantage of the CRT to blend pixels, it's an undeniable fact that the CTR was applying blend, bloom, shadows, and scanlines to what it displayed. There's no reason for modern games using pixel art to do this if they don't want to because resolutions are high enough you don't even really need such a thing to get that effect, but it's important to make sure people are aware that games of the time made for NTSC displays don't look like how they're designed to be seen unless you apply some visual filters to them to emulate a CRT. You say the image of Richter Belmont isn't a good example, but it appears it is included in there to show what a piece of pixel art from the time, a piece of artwork that was not designed in particular to exploit the CRT display, still looks radically different from the raw sprite without the scanlines, blend, bloom, and shadow effect. Heck, even upping the resolution of the CRT changes the display as I remember back in 2000s there was a big to do for the burgeoning home arcade movement where people building machines to connect to arcade machines were using custom graphics cards or firmware to output lower NTSC resolutions as even upping to a VGA resolution changed the way the games were displayed. Also, I think you might be underestimating how much pixel art used the CRT blending. For example, dithering is a standard feature of graphics software, you see it a ton in lots of old artwork at the time and you'll see it pop up in any large format pictures that have been generated for a game system as it's a function the graphics design software can make for the artist. On art meant for PCs where there's a higher resolution this usually kept the file size low and allowed the artwork to be in something with a restricted color palette like GIF, or it helped make images look good when we only had 16 color VGA or 256 color Super VGA, but on an NTSC monitor that dithering effect does blend. You can see the effect used extensively in old artwork, like what you'd see created on the old AMIGA systems.

Even when I play my original NES on a CRT television with RF output, I can still make out the individual pixels. It's not like the image is super smoothed out or anything.

I never stopped to consider that the lower resolution on CRTs actually made the sprites look more rounded (in cases like Chrono's portrait).

One starting point if you want to figure out whether an SNES game's pixel art was crafted with the CRT TV in mind (rather than what it looked like on graph paper or the artist's workstation) is to look at the proportions of stuff like circles. Games tended to get internally rendered in 16 : 10 and scaled to 4 : 3 by the TV. On PC, Doom is a funny example as the HUD and monster sprite design clearly took into account that they were getting scaled from 320x200 to 320x240... but wall textures did not, so all squares turn into slightly tall rectangles. But, regardless of original intent, it's worth keeping in mind that a lot of us spent more time playing our 8 and 16-bit games emulated on PC than we did the original hardware. Plus, the CRT smoothing effect varied a lot between different brands and models. So there's no one presentation of the art that we'd all have in our nostalgic memories.

Shovel Knight too me took from not only DuckTales but also Mario 3, Zelda II, and Mega Man, which all look blocky lol

I'm not sure I'd say most games didn't take CRTs into consideration, but rather, it became a more common practice gradually as the years went by. Most 8-bit games obviously didn't take advantage of the CRT's blur, but it really started popping up around the 16-bit era, most commonly on Genesis, but many later SNES games did it as well. By the time consoles jumped to 3D, it was all over the place, and I'd say it's where it shines the most. Just my own perspective on the matter. I'm not about to try to police others on what they should prefer.

I also prefer the CRT look for retro games, but it's not that simple! We had pixel-sharp screens with Gameboy and other handhelds back then. And not everyone grew up with consoles. Home computer monitors from Commodore for the Amiga, for example, and later MS-DOS PCs, did have a certain CRT look, they were CRTs after all. But not nearly as clear as with CRT TVs. Anyone who played games like Monkey Island, Indiana Jones, Wing Commander, Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, etc. on their PC in the first half of the 90s was already used to the very sharp pixel look of today's screens. This became even more apparent with the first Super VGA games from the mid-90s.

We were kids, we pirated at a dime. It's real nostalgia to us!

It is interesting that some games today add a CRT render filter, but honestly I have always feel those are inaccurate. These days we do know all of the distortion effects of a CRT monitor, but if you were to tell me just half of those distortion effects while I was using CRT monitors, I would says "you're full of it. I can not see anything on my monitor that looks like that" And I was using CRTs into the Xbox 360 era. But sometimes I see these games with a CRT render filter, and it has these distortions that are so exaugurated, one wonders how a CRT was even watchable in the first place. (Assuming that was their only reference to what CRT monitors look like.) Maybe I just had a good quality CRT, but so many games with the filter really do have these distortions so exaugurated that it feels like a false interpretation to what a CRT was like. Some of those distortions I can even swear didn't exist on any CRT I used. I'm sure those distortions did exist, but they were so weak that you'd have to get unreasonably close to the monitor to see them.

The first time I saw Aerith's (FFVII) portrait on LCD, I was just like "Awwww hell no."