I feel EGA forced artists to work within the limitations of the available color palette, and good artists created awesome stuff (like shown in this case). Once they had VGA, some artists rushed to use every color gradient they could get away with, and this ruined their art till they got the hang of it.
Something similar happened with the transition from pixel art to 3D games -- games were 3D because they had to, whether necessary or not. And many suffered from it. (Arguably, many still do!)
Of course, I hold the extremist opinion that even some CGA (4 colors!) games were beautiful in their own way. I don't think more is always better, a lesson that seems to be lost on some game developers...
Perhaps I'm just looking at things through rose tinted glasses, but I very much agree with this. I like to think that good pixel art works with the imagination. The artist puts down the broad strokes and lets the imagination fill the rest! There is a huge amount of skill that goes into good pixel art. It's not enough to have attention to detail, but an intuition about engaging and working with imagination.
The more realistic the graphics, the higher the risk that it falls into the uncanny valley trap. The brain is already half fooled that it is seeing reality (or something that is supposed to be real) but if it's only slightly off, there'll be a feeling of unease. Of course, early 3d games were far off from feeling real, but they were already a step up and there was less headroom for imagination. The low polygon count models just look janky instead of endearing.
Pixel art completely sidesteps this uncanny valley by not trying to be realistic, instead it tries to engage the brain to fill in the details. It's perhaps halfway between reading a book and watching a movie.
E.g. looking at early 3d games, they just feel dated. One cannot help but compare them to today's 3d graphics and of course the oldies fall short by a very far margin. Comparing pixel art games to a modern AAA 3D game title is just so obviously apples to oranges that there is no struggle due to loss of fidelity.
Again, perhaps my view is biased because I grew up with the pixelated games of old. Still, I'd like to assign the excitement of the early 3d titles more to the novelty (at the time) than from the fidelity of the graphics. I think the pixel art style will (or already does) have much more staying power.
>E.g. looking at early 3d games, they just feel dated. One cannot help but compare them to today's 3d graphics and of course the oldies fall short by a very far margin. Comparing pixel art games to a modern AAA 3D game title is just so obviously apples to oranges that there is no struggle due to loss of fidelity.
>Again, perhaps my view is biased because I grew up with the pixelated games of old. Still, I'd like to assign the excitement of the early 3d titles more to the novelty (at the time) than from the fidelity of the graphics. I think the pixel art style will (or already does) have much more staying power.
I happen to agree that early 3d games like PS1/N64 look rather ugly, but nostalgia is very powerful, and retro low poly models is now its own aesthetic [0]. Like with pixel art, artists will take liberties with what was actually capable with hardware at the time, but people who grew up with the style will probably appreciate it more.
I never played this Indiana Jones game, or have much memory of other EGA games that I can think of, and to me, 90% of the VGA screenshots in this article look better than the EGA ones.
To me, the limited color palette doesn't strike me as a differently meaningful sort of limitation than, say, the appearance of Mario 64 vs Mario Galaxy.
The imagination always fills in the gap - I don't remember KOTOR looking worse than Mass Effect looking worse than Mass Effect Andromeda, say, but if I go back and look at them, they definitely were more limited - but if you don't have the memory of just how much your imagination originally filled in, I think it's harder to look past the actual pixels.
I'm sure it has to do with the games I grew up with, but I still think EGA Last Crusade is better than VGA, and I find beauty in EGA Monkey Island and even in blockier games like Kings of the Beach or Street Rod! And of course, I love the EGA graphics of my adored Space Quest I, II & III.
Yes, this means I go back to those games now and I still find their graphics cool looking and evocative.
> The imagination always fills in the gap
Fully agreed! I think this is a quality that gets lost with games with more realistic graphics.
> To me, the limited color palette doesn't strike me as a differently meaningful sort of limitation than, say, the appearance of Mario 64 vs Mario Galaxy.
I believe it is a meaningful limitation. It's like working in a black & white drawing with a pencil, or with an early comic book illustration. It's not just fewer colors, you must re-think the illustration. An obvious example is the use of dithering, which when done right can be a beautiful art form. With VGA, you need way less dithering, if at all.
I agree that some of the VGA art looks better, but here's the curse of the higher definition: if you look at the crypt scene, the VGA flavor has more detail, but now the crypt walls look as if made of modern concrete and the stalactites look as if made out of clay. This is not an issue with the EGA version because these details are left to the viewers imagination and it will tend to superimpose the details exactly according to the viewers expectations. In the VGA version, there is nothing left to the imagination, the brain is just confronted with the fact that the crypt walls are made in the style of brutalist architecture from poured concrete. This does not mesh at all with the setting of an ancient tomb! At least my subconscious has strong views on how ancient tombs are supposed to be :)
There's a similar issue with the first scene inside the nazi fort, where the wall in the EGA version is made of rough hewn rocks and whether you imagine them to be slimy, moldy, smooth or rough is entirely up to you. There are only the broad strokes to guide your subconscious. The VGA version presents a done deal of what looks like modern masonry. Again it's jarring - we are supposed to be looking at the ancient foundations of the fort.
In other cases, the artists did a better job with VGA so it's either OK or in rare cases better than the EGA version. Perhaps it also comes down to how vivid one's imagination is. Someone who has no preconceptions about the scenery or does not have a particularly strong visual imagination will just see a bunch of rough lines in the EGA flavor, and they won't mind the somewhat off putting lighting or details in the VGA screens - they'll just assume that's how it's supposed to be.
Agreed with a lot of what you say -- it's what I mentioned as "closure", using the concept from "Understanding Comics". It's a powerful mental tool, and artists should be wary not to undermine it with the "wrong" details (i.e. details that contradict or undermine the story your brain is building for you).
However, the article does show examples where the EGA screen is undeniably better, for example whenever there's a lightning effect. I can't understand why they weren't made for the VGA version, especially considering how easy they are to make with a simple palette rotation. The castle exterior looks so much better, more detailed and with more effects in the EGA version that it boggles the mind.
> I like to think that good pixel art works with the imagination.
Fully agreed with this and the rest of your post. Are you familiar with Scott McCloud's "Understanding Comics"? I'm not particularly a fan of the whole book, but I really agree and am fascinated by the concept of "closure" he describes: the way the mind "fills in" the details that are missing in sequential art (i.e. comics), so you mentally create movement and detail when there is objectively none. This even works for storytelling itself, from a few "action" frames you mentally reconstruct the story, and this requires little effort.
I think the same happens with pixel or line art. You just need some cues and then your brain gets to work on creating the scene.
Last Crusade supported CGA. I don't know how it was implemented, though -- it looks like dithering was used at least to emulate some of the EGA colors. [1]
That wasn't the only change, through. I remember that there is a rotisserie in the castle which rotates in EGA/VGA, but does not in CGA, so they likely knew that the computers with CGA could not handle the animation as well.
CGA looks worse in modern screenshots though. The colour palette could be awful but the monitor would add some blur between the pixels and that helped. EGA had the same. VGA 320x200 was pixel doubled (640x400 was fed to the monitor) so it looked much blockier.
And if the colour palette wasn't to your taste... For years I had CGA with a monochrome composite monitor. So it was all shades of green. The old LucasArts and Sierra games were fine on mono CGA.
Also we walked uphill both ways to school, etc, get your 4k displays off my lawn...
CGA color looked even better on a composite color monitor (like a standard TV). Developers were able to abuse NTSC color artifacts to get a surprising amount of color out of their games. The downside was that text became generally unreadable.
Yep, CGA in monochrome is quite pleasant. Black, amber, and two intermediate shades of amber, what more could one need?! It's really much nicer than any of the garish CGA colour palettes. [With the possible exception of the black-red-cyan-white undocumented palette.]
EGA is great though, 320x200x16 is just one of those natural sweet spots that many different early computers eventually settled on.
This is largely cherry-picking revisionism. I saw CGA on the displays of the time at the time with the games of the time, and can confirm it was mostly terrible. EGA couldn't come fast enough.
You’re missing the point. I wasn’t suggesting CGA was brilliant. I was just saying that CGA actually works best when differed because the screens of the time blended the pixels to create new colours. And that the reason CGA uses the colour scheme it does is because that allows for more colours to be created via blending.
EGA was definitely a massive step up, no question. But people also miss the point of CGA when they look as sharp screenshots rendered on a pixel perfect LCD display.
Good point. Fiddling with blur in Gimp does remove plenty of that dither noise. Though of course now my eyes keep trying to refocus, just like in the olde times.
Yes, to me those are examples where CGA didn't work well. It wasn't suitable for this kind of scenes. This cyan-magenta-white default palette was also pretty jarring; the green-red-yellow one was better looking.
This is obviously highly subjective, but you might be thinking of CGA's default palette (magenta-cyan-white-black). The device had more than one palette, and many games used the red-green-yellow-black palette, which looks much more pleasing to me.
Those indeed look pretty cool, but that's a matter of higher resolution which allows for cool dithering effects. CGA color modes were pretty low res, so it's likely that's the actual problem you have with them, not just the 4 colors. Or rather, the combination of both factors.
That's the low intensity dark green-dark red-brown-black palette, not the high intensity light red-light green-yellow-black palette. The high intensity mode was about a quarter as garish as the cyan magenta mode, which won't make your eyeballs bleed, but it's still a mite bit uncomfortable.
The dark green dark red brown black palette was indeed probably the least bad palette, but it suffered severely from a lack of contrast. That's why the text is hard to read, because it's black text on a brown background, not because of the resolution.
The reason the cyan magenta white black palette was so common is because it had both black and white, meaning the text was easy to read.
The Tandy graphics adapter allowed a programmable palette. It was still just 4 colors, but the programmer could choose which 4 colors they were. (out of the 16 colors a CGA monitor could display) This was such a minor increase in complexity for a 10x improvement in usefulness it's shocking to me that IBM didn't include that in the CGA.
First things first: thanks for the insightful reply!
Yes, I meant the low intensity palette, you're correct. I disagree with you in that I don't find it "the least bad", but actually beautiful. It has a kind of "wood engraving" vibe to me.
> That's why the text is hard to read, because it's black text on a brown background, not because of the resolution.
I respectfully disagree. It's true that the contrast is lower than with a brighter color, but it's still not a problem for my eyes. For me, it actually has to do with the blockiness of the low res font; also there's some aliasing with the "m" and similar characters that confuses my eyes and I have to make an extra effort the parse the characters -- the same would happen were this black font on white background.
The Tandy fascinates me since I saw that video by The 8 Bit Guy. Sadly, I never owned one!
Gorgeous! Thanks for sharing. I think CGA is an extreme case of "working with limitations/constraints". It was hard to get it right, but when they did, as in this case, it was awesome.
Not much to look at, but plays well into the noir theme in this case.
The aesthetic recently had a resurgence in the indie scene, with ‘Obra Dinn’ and whatnot. Many gamemakers especially reminisce about Gameboy's four-color palette.
It shines on a CRT with composite input. It's still the same eye-piercing nastiness people are familiar with today if you used an RGB monitor like the IBM 5153, which IBM marketed for use with the CGA card.
Indeed. I found out about CGA's amazing composite output only recently, watching a video by The 8 Bit guy. I was completely unaware of this back in the day...
As someone with no nostalgia for the PSX/N64, it's hard not to look back on that as an entire generation of ugly graphics. SNES pixel art has aged beautifully, Cloud's polygons have not.
That's not even counting the many, many games with wonky cameras. It feels like cameras were not widely figured out until the 360/PS3 generation.
100% agree. It's telling that most contemporary pixel artists work by choice with a limited palette. The actual number of colors, even in complex pieces, is often shockingly small.
I had a PCjr in the 90s, which meant that most games were CGA unless I happened to find one that supported the rare-but-more-common-than-native-PCjr-EGA Tandy TGA 16-color mode, in which case I’d get 16 colors. Every game acquisition was a crapshoot to see if I was lucky or not. Native EGA was out.
> Of course, I hold the extremist opinion that even some CGA (4 colors!) games were beautiful in their own way.
This is one reason I appreciate Downwell. You unlock new 4-color palettes as you progress. Some are really nice to look at and completely change the mood of the game.
Yes! Limitations inspire creativity; necessity is the mother of invention; video games from the earliest days of the industry / art form have (by far) the most replayability and "fun per pixel" or whatever metric you care to choose.
My first PC XT clone also ran Hercules with an ambar monitor. SIMCGA FTW! I still feel very nostalgic about that look & feel. I programmed my first real graphics using that hardware.
(I started with a Commodore 64, but I was too young and didn't really manage to output graphics with it).
The same thing applies to MIDI music from the same era. Though I'm not sure how much of it was related to the technology and how much was the culture or aesthetic influences of game makers at the time.
Yeah. I never played this game, but the EGA scenes feel evocative and the VGA ones don't. Similar to the Loom discussion the other day.
Mostly it feels like the EGA artist was better at dramatic lighting. For example, in the EGA version of the dead templar, the neck area is pure black for a reason: it makes the skull, the focal point of the image, stand out more. But in the VGA version they decided to paint something there, so the image became less focused.
I don't know, in the EGA version the sarcophagus is much more prominent, which takes away the focus from the face quite a bit.
To me the VGA version actually feels like it is more focussed on the face and shield by making the background less intrusive..
Yes, looking back on the EGA graphics, there is definitely a level of skill and stylization that I took for granted at the time and have a certain nostalgia for, but when the VGA versions of these games came out they were all mind-blowing and you just kind of had to be there - no one was selecting the EGA option if they had a VGA card.
I remember the VGA version of Indiana Jones in particular being awesome in VGA, on a CRT, live in motion.
yep. I had EGA and played most of these games on it - I remember seeing the same games on my friends VGA screens and they were sooooo much better on those.
Looking at them now, the EGA ones have a certain amount of nostalgia, but I vividly remember 16 colours being really limiting, especially at those resolutions where dithering was really noticeable.
I remember when I got my first VGA card, I was so excited and the games did look so much better to me! It's also how I felt about getting my first audio card (the original Sound Blaster)
Even looking at the comparisons in that post I still prefer the VGA versions over the EGA versions. Guess I did not get enough exposure to EGA to have that much nostalgia for it. My family got a computer around '91 and I think the VGA card came within a year after purchase
It was very early for VGA, or more technically MCGA 300 x 200 x 256 colour mode. Artists had not yet figured out how to utilize 256 colour palette to the best of art.
While I played this game on an Atari 1024ST which I believe used an EGA like display I remember a (not so) similar graphics quality situation with Space Quest V which I started playing in a CGA monochrome monitor and at some point Roger was supposed to mop a floor with a yellow - if I remember correctly - logo that changed from dark yellow to shiny yellow while cleaning it. I had to buy a EGA color monitor to get through this part of the game as no matter the path I chose, I couldn't really see any changes with the monochrome one in order to complete the task...
Nitpicking, but the OCS ("classic") Amiga can also display 64 colors (in half brite mode) or even the full 4096 color palette (in hold and modify/HAM mode). That's what made people's jaws drop back then.
And in the 320x200 mode used by these games, standard EGA can display only 16 colors from a 16 color palette, for backwards compatibility with CGA monitors.
The Amiga also had HAM mode that could display all 4096 colours but it was somewhat limited in what you could use it for. When I first saw that it looked like witchcraft.
I had a similar issue with conquest of camelot. I was playing on a monochrome display, and you had to find an amulet in the catacombs. I spent hours looking for it, then I played it on my dad's computer with EGA, and it was bright yellow on gray and glaringly obvious.
Honestly, one of the best things I learned when I was doing work on complexity with Stuart Kauffman was the idea of enabling constraints. The fact that in many circumstances putting constraints can actually lead to more complex and better situations when there is creation. Essentially, the enabling constraint has the effect of putting more of the creation on the line of criticality and thus suddenly you get far more creative growth.
These EGA/VGA comparisons (this is the second I've seen so far) almost demonstrate this perfectly. It's really quite fascinating.
If you have an interest in this kind of art, this GDC presentation by Mark Ferrari "8 Bit & 8 Bit-ish Graphics" gives lots of great detail about the art process, tools, and practices of the time (Ferrari worked on the EGA art for Monkey Island, among several others).
When I was a kid in high school and considering a career in art, Mark Ferrari was kind enough to invite me to hang out in his home studio and chat about making art for games.
Apparently he had to fight with the engineers over switching to a dithered art style because at the time they were using run length encoding for compression. But, he re-painted a few scenes to be dithered and the improvement was so obvious that the engineers gave in and “made it work” (switched to LZW compression).
The art for Indy 3 in EGA definitely shows signs of dither being desired but not used, which I always found made it feel sparse and unfinished, even in VGA. Mind, I was coming to this from the standpoint of really getting into the Lucasarts adventures after LOOM. It's likely that on this game they were stretched for space regardless, since it spans a lot of scenes.
As someone who grew up playing in VGA, EGA was always the "outdated" option I was glad to avoid (and let's be honest, most EGA artists did not have the skills of Steve Purcell). But this makes a pretty damning case in favor of the original art.
The thing this immediately brought to mind for me was the way Silent Hill 2 was absolutely massacred a few years back in its supposed "remaster" (they left out the FOG): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silent_Hill_HD_Collection. This seems to be an eternal pitfall: "Upgrading" graphics while failing to realize that impressive visuals are about artistic skill and effort (often MOSTLY), not just technical stats.
The "EGA is better" crowd makes me think of the "vinyl is better" one. Sure, albums produced with the vinyl as the target, verbatim put on CD, were better on real vynil. But that doesn't mean the vinyl is better per se, at least not technically.
Here is almost the same, due to its limitation EGA needed some creativity that VGA didn't need. But in the end VGA was also mastered and produced some masterpieces (for example Monkey Island 2 to remain into the LucasArts realm).
EGA isn't better. The point is, at least in the articles at hand even if not in the Hacker News discussions, that the artists who redrew things for VGA didn't do that very well, and made lighting mistakes or overused gradient fills. The articles at hand make the point that this was in turn in part because they hadn't really learned how to draw for VGA yet. But some of the errors are just basic drawing errors and nothing to do with the medium. If the sunset is behind the tree, then the front of the tree is in shadow, for example, not filled in because EGA-to-VGA means rôte filling in every black void just because it is there.
While it's easy to attribute that to the artists, seeing those pictures it seems they got the (thankless?) task to give the EGA pictures a new coat of paint. Sounds more like factory line work to me than 'artistic vision'.
Some of the EGA graphics stand out more, but I think the VGA graphics do exactly what they are meant to do: more colourful pictures to show off your new video card in all their gradient glory ;)
I originally played the Amiga version back in the day, but it was (as far as I can see) 100% identical to the EGA version and therefore looked pretty bad compared with Amiga-native games or better ports. To their credit, Lucasfilm put more effort into later games (Indy IV, Monkey Island I/II etc.). The Amiga's graphics were in between EGA and VGA (palette of 4096 colors, but only 32 colors at the same time without further tricks), so it wasn't really straightforward to port a PC game...
I think that I enjoyed Fate of Atlantis more, especially because it had the three paths to give it some more ways to play. I avoided the "Fists" path because my keyboard didn't have a number pad.
I went back to both of them, decades years later, and found Last Crusade to be much more challenging in a way that games no longer offer (besides Dark Souls) -- they let you make mistakes which hinder or make completion almost impossible. You could get pretty far in to Last Crusade and not have the required items to progress further.
Many gamers hated this kind of "getting irreversibly stuck" situation of early adventure games, and in fact Lucasarts made a conscious effort to avoid it in later games (e.g. Full Throttle, Monkey Island, etc). You couldn't even die (yes, I know about the dying easter egg in Monkey Island).
This was in contrast with Sierra Online's adventures, which had plenty of surprise deaths and deadend situations. This led to saving frantically at every step, which isn't particularly fun.
I loved Sierra games -- the first three EGA Space Quest games are my favorites -- but I see the point of avoiding player frustration.
I don't like getting stuck permanently. Even in Dark Souls there are no ways to get irreversibly stuck, although you can make it significantly more challenging by killing certain NPCs along the way and losing the ability to use the services that they once offered.
I now felt alarmed enough to check which version of Maniac Mansion I have in the ‘to-play’ pile. Don't know if there are marked differences in V2: PCGamingWiki notes that it has ‘moderately improved graphics with more overall colors’. Still looks pretty EGA to me in the opening sequences.
Im pretty sure I have the retail box and floppies for this game. Going from 16 to 256 colors does seem to make the scenes look prettier but for me the 1st game that stands out in my memory showcasing the VGA improvement is a simple breakout game called Bananoid.
These images brought back some powerful memories, one in particular is hearing the chorus of the song Self Control by Laura Branigan comming out of my friends C64 in or around 1986. The next time I heard a simmilar example was a .wav file of the song Daisy but that was years later.
The retail box came with a replica of Henry Jones’s grail diary. That was mind blowing for a ten-year-old who had just seen the movie. All in all still one of my fondest gaming memories.
The game's simple copy protection system required you to look up things in it too, a touch I loved. The later Fate of Atlantis game did a similar thing as well.
This is a small part of the charm of these old games newer players on ScummVM miss out on, as ScummVM (sensibly) removes the in-game copy protection questions. They were integrated into the game in a sympathetic way that made looking up the diary feel like Indy hunting for clues etc.
One VGA with multidirectional smooth scrolling that really impressed me, back in the day, was a shoot'em up called Zone66 [1]. It was hard to get running on DOS, but it was a beauty -- and fun, too!
I remember being very excited for Zone66 since I had seen other things by Renaissance and it used protected mode to squeeze every ounce of processing power out of my PC. In the end, though, the game just wasn't very fun. It had a cool introduction, though!
I never had an actual EGA GPU and only experienced EGA through switching to the EGA mode as some games offered. Nevertheless I feel like there is something oddly special/atmospheric/psychedelic/whatever in the EGA pictures. I'm glad I have seen this kind of graphics. EGA is pixel art squared, it is to colour what pixel art is to actual graphics so never seeing EGA is the same kind of loss as never seeing pixel art.
Ditto, and fully agreed with your post. Though it's odd seeing EGA called a "GPU"... that's later terminology, back then this were graphics adapters or, in our street parlance, "graphics cards" ;)
There was also an odd time where every graphics card got called a "VGA" in its broadest sense, unrelated to actual VGA modes.
I feel it's time to talk about the beloved Hercules adapter and SIMCGA!
I used to love the credits at the end of old video games - they were half the motivation to get to the end of the game. Some of them had surprisingly good, almost cinematic music - I can still remember the credits music from the end of Sega Master System's "Ys The Vanished Omens" like it was yesterday.
Q for players of modern video games: do they still have great ending credits scenes like that?
Oh, I loved Ys. Ys III on Genesis was one of my favorite games from that era.
I only play a select few contemporary video games, so my sample is somewhat limited, but none of them have had the sort of credits scenes that we enjoyed in the '80s and '90s. Nowadays it's just another cutscene like all the others sprinkled throughout the game. In fact, when I finished the main quest line in Assassin's Creed: Valhalla, I wasn't even sure I was done! This might be particular to open world games though, which don't really have an end, per se; you just sort of run out of things to do.
Not even a cutscene in a lot of cases: just the standard text on black background like you'd see in a movie (though some of them will do the movie thing and have little "hidden" scenes cut into the credits at points).
I think that you were supposed to mostly rely on stealth. You don't have to fight the big guy in the castle -- you can get him very drunk take him down with one punch.
I looked and looked and looked and for the life of me could not see the excessive gradients that he was talking about in the image captions. And then towards the end of the article, as my mouse was gliding over one of the images, I noticed it change :)
And then I enjoyed the article all over again. Properly this time.
I was too young to play the first version of the game and I never realized they changed it. I chuckled at the Sam and Max addition back then, but for me the games were all there already. The hook on the skeleton's arm... It seems like the game was a bit more serious before :)
Anyway, what I miss most from Lucas Arts games are the running gags to decipher, so I guess this way was better for me.
Those old SCUMM/Lucasfilm Games titles have such a distinctive aesthetic. All it takes is one glance and you know who made that game. Or maybe it's just Ron Gilbert.
What a great game, I remember playing it for many many hours on our family’s 286 computer.
I’m not sure I ever got to the end, but I definitely remember crashing that biplane :)
Not sure if you're being sarcastic... you know you only see the VGA one when you hover over it with your mouse? You know which is which because you know which one you're pointing at, right?
Maybe people are confused about the animation as well - the images are animated but these minor things like doors moving around aren't the changes they're talking about.
Ah, I just opened the page and scrolled down, saw what looked like pairs of images but couldn't really tell if one had more colours than the other. The text didn't help to enlighten me either. But now I see the description in the intro.
Eh? I did assume good faith. I checked if they were wanting a serious reply because it wasn't clear, then I explained how to do what they wanted to do, even though it was already in the article.
Perhaps I've fallen victim to a regional language difference but even with the most generous interpretation I could manage, the addition of "mate" on the end of your comment left me with the impression that you were being (mildly) aggressive.
I will refer myself to my own quote from the guidelines :-)
I feel EGA forced artists to work within the limitations of the available color palette, and good artists created awesome stuff (like shown in this case). Once they had VGA, some artists rushed to use every color gradient they could get away with, and this ruined their art till they got the hang of it.
Something similar happened with the transition from pixel art to 3D games -- games were 3D because they had to, whether necessary or not. And many suffered from it. (Arguably, many still do!)
Of course, I hold the extremist opinion that even some CGA (4 colors!) games were beautiful in their own way. I don't think more is always better, a lesson that seems to be lost on some game developers...