Was it actually designed that way, or was it a happy accident? It probably wasn't designed that way for most games in any event. That article gets cited a lot, but IMO, it doesn't actually represent the main distinguishing stylistic differences that make these things appealing, which are more to do with mental inferences from missing information. A smiley is a relatable presentation of emotion because it doesn't present any subtle features to you. Lack of detail means greater generality, which becomes 'charm'. CRT noise probably isn't a major factor.
The behavior of pixels on a CRT is important because CRT pixels really don't behave like colored squares. For example, a diagonal line might look smooth rather than jagged because of the way the pixels blend together, even though the same pixels viewed on a modern LCD would clearly look like a zig-zag of squares. The people making the pixel art for games in this time period were definitely aware of how CRTs displayed their pixels and were designing accordingly.
Of course, you're right that it's not just a question of an old CRT being effectively a different artistic medium than a modern LCD. The best pixel art is carefully crafted to convey the impression of an image of much higher resolution than the actual pixels. There's several good demonstration of this idea in this article: http://www.dinofarmgames.com/a-pixel-artist-renounces-pixel-...
>The best pixel art is carefully crafted to convey the impression of an image of much higher resolution than the actual pixels.
This is the kind of thing I'm arguing against. The "best" pixel art doesn't not convey what a higher resolution picture does. It conveys the important stuff and leaves the mind to interpolate the rest. You can do the same with high resolution art, as has been done in anime since forever. Leave noses off, don't draw lines between teeth, etc.
The article you linked, and the article about CRT filters are both over-cited and missing the big picture. (FFS, if the guy who "quit pixel art" knew what made it good, he wouldn't have had to quit it and publish a whiney article about how everyone else doesn't appreciate it.)
Good pixel art isn't good because someone designed it for a specific output or because it mimics high res art. It's not good because it blurs well on a CRT. It's good because it conveys something the observer can relate to and understand, just like any other art. The low resolution means that you have a medium which expects you to convey what is important from a distance and with a palette which allows ambiguity. Which is a major boon if that's what you're trying to do. (For instance, to avoid projecting a characters' emotions onto the player and instead let the player interpret their own emotions in the art.)
And the CRT article also manages to assert -- without any evidence whatsoever -- that the designer of old games made good art because they purposefully accounted for rendering on a CRT, rather than the equally likely possibility that this was an accident and that they were simply designing art within constraints that required them to choose what they really wanted to convey at the expense of other features. AKA, that they were just good artists regardless of medium.
How could the designers of old games possibly do anything other than design for CRTs? They were almost certainly looking at their art displayed on CRTs, and if it didn't look right on a CRT, they would adjust it until they did.
As for saying that pixel art conveys or implies a higher resolution image, I worded my point so poorly as to be wrong. It has nothing to do with resolution per se. You explained what I was trying to say much better: good pixel art presents an image with few details but conveys the impression of a much higher-detail image by encouraging the viewer's mind to interpolate. And you also make a good point that this feature is not unique to pixel art.
I also agree with your claim that the best pixel artists are simply good artists who happen to be working in the medium of pixel art.
Anyway, my original point was that you can't really get pixel art that properly conveys the important details and encourages the viewer to imagine the rest simply by down-sampling higher-resolution art.
They designed on CRTs, not for them. There's a subtle difference.
Imagine I'm trying to optimize a computer program. If I do it on machine A, then I'm optimizing on A, but only for A if I pay particular attention to the architecture of A to drive optimization decisions. On the other hand, if I'm making high-level optimizations -- like using more efficient data structures -- I'm still optimizing, but my program will still run just as fast in other environments, because the specific optimizations I'm doing aren't special features of machine A. So when you go for the low-hanging fruit first, you are satisfying general optimization principles.
I see no reason to believe that these artists were analyzing their art in the context of making it look good on a CRT rather than just making it look good, with the CRT being an incidental tool. I would imagine that most of this art was probably developed on paper before it was programmed, and most corrections thereafter were applied only to fix glaring mistakes. It's quite a stretch for someone to claim that this is processes intentionally took CRTs into account during the design, or that CRTs naturally make this style of art look 'better.' CRTs might provide some quirky nostalgia, but I don't buy it that we're somehow missing out on the 'intended' experience by not using them. That's just moral preening unless we've got an industry artist willing to detail the actual process they used and support the claim. (Like someone is trying to tell my burritos aren't 'authentic Mexican' enough to taste good.)
Fun anecdote: One of the first graphics I made was a font, complete with smooth round edges. I had an Amiga connected to a CRT. Proud me took it to my friend to show off. He had a real monitor. My font looked like blocky crap :-)
