It’s not only nostalgia. Arbitrary limitations drive creativity. Previously the limitations were imposed by the hardware. Today the designer can choose their own limitations.
I was thinking this recently when watching footage of Dread Delusion, a 2024 game that looks like something out of 1999.
It’s a visually interesting game, maybe not profoundly so, but it gave me a passing thought about what makes a game more “artistic”. I was looking at a rocky wall texture, low res enough to count the individual pixels, but I still recognized it as rock. And then I asked myself what takes more skill: a high fidelity AAA game that just megascans a real rock surface to capture as much detail as possible, or a game like Dread Delusion trying to convey the idea of a rock in as little detail as possible.
Developers back in the day would have absolutely killed to have the hardware capabilities we have today. No longer needing to worry about fitting games on a tiny disc or cartridge measured only in MB, not even in GB. Even Dread Delusion, despite looking like a PS1 game, could not have fit on even 3 PS1 discs. But it was those very limitations that made developers really have to think carefully about their content, the total scope of the games they wanted to make, how much detail they could afford to include, etc.
I don’t think those limitations necessarily made games inherently better, because there were still a lot of bad games back in the day. But it meant that everything had more deliberation to it, where a developer would create a game that was one really good idea instead of a game made of 20 just “okay” ideas.
It’s not only nostalgia. Arbitrary limitations drive creativity. Previously the limitations were imposed by the hardware. Today the designer can choose their own limitations.
this is evident when looking at modern pixel art games. something like Celeste could never run on an SNES or Genesis.
even Shovel Knight, which is made specifically to mimic NES games, ignores some limitations of the NES
I wonder how low-poly art styles will evolve with time? even modern pixel art is quite different from the pixel art of the 2010s
I was thinking this recently when watching footage of Dread Delusion, a 2024 game that looks like something out of 1999.
It’s a visually interesting game, maybe not profoundly so, but it gave me a passing thought about what makes a game more “artistic”. I was looking at a rocky wall texture, low res enough to count the individual pixels, but I still recognized it as rock. And then I asked myself what takes more skill: a high fidelity AAA game that just megascans a real rock surface to capture as much detail as possible, or a game like Dread Delusion trying to convey the idea of a rock in as little detail as possible.
Developers back in the day would have absolutely killed to have the hardware capabilities we have today. No longer needing to worry about fitting games on a tiny disc or cartridge measured only in MB, not even in GB. Even Dread Delusion, despite looking like a PS1 game, could not have fit on even 3 PS1 discs. But it was those very limitations that made developers really have to think carefully about their content, the total scope of the games they wanted to make, how much detail they could afford to include, etc.
I don’t think those limitations necessarily made games inherently better, because there were still a lot of bad games back in the day. But it meant that everything had more deliberation to it, where a developer would create a game that was one really good idea instead of a game made of 20 just “okay” ideas.