“What actually happened was the birth of a genre in digital graphics”

A really well-produced 27-minute video from Super Splash Wave about 8-bit and 16-bit pixel art: What I liked about the video is that it doesn’t just revel in nostalgia, but goes deeper into some techniques and trends and details in the videogame graphics of the 1980s and the 1990s: palette limitations, palette animation, sizes of objects, dithering, parallax, small ventures into 3D, etc. It was also great to see specific changes and evolution of what from the distance of 2026 might seem like one monolithic era. The very first games used rigid grids and the assets were generally done by engineers themselves. Then, the work was split between artists doing the visuals, and engineers implementing then. Only after that, closer collaboration between engineering and artists allowed truly spectacular effects to take place, mirroring deep collaboration between UX and front-end elsewhere.#games #graphics #history #youtube