4 Gigs of Ram Running an 8-bit Game

Imagine that you’re playing a game where all of the graphics are rendered in 8-bit sprites. The backgrounds are either totally unmoving or nervously wavering between two frames, bullets are moving slowly enough to qualify for disability benefits, you’re only tenuously agreeing with the game’s assertion that one particular mass of pixels represents a human male, and the part of “The Explosion” is being played by an orange sphere, due to actual explosions having too much dignity to take part in this production.
Chances are, you’re either playing:

-A game from the 1980s, that originally ran on hardware so simple that it was occasionally found as natural formations in silicon-rich environments, or
-A modern game, running on a computer capable of beating up the older one, taking its money, and running off with its girlfriend in the space of two seconds, all while planning the economic future of several small Eastern-European countries and pirating the latest Lady Gaga album.

“Retro” style games are so ubiquitous nowadays that nobody even finds them odd. When you load up a flash game and find out that it’s a platformer with graphics that would run scared from an Amiga, you don’t close the window in bafflement that such a thing could exist in this TRON-esque future world of ours, you just play the game without giving it a thought. It’s just a commonly accepted fact that this era of gaming, which can produce games that render a man’s body exploding in four dimensions and individually track each of his dearly departed body parts over a game area the size of Switzerland, can also produce flash games that represent such an action as eight glowing pixels floating in different directions.

Pictured: The end result of several decades of progress in game design.

So why is this the case? Well, in a lot of instances, a major reason is that pixilated graphics are comparatively easy to design. Not everybody who makes a game is an artist capable of producing works rivaling Van Gogh’s paintings. Most of us would be lucky to manage something rivaling an XKCD strip. And not everybody has the funds necessary to hire somebody who can draw something that wouldn’t be taken down from their mother’s refrigerator out of shame. So when somebody needs artwork for a game, a non-artist will usually choose to use a style that’s easy to work with, a role that pixel graphics fit into neatly. After all, pixels are just colored squares that fit into a grid, and there are several programs specifically made to produce this type of drawing. It may take time to produce the artwork in this manner, but it’s hard to screw it up in the same magnificent way that you can screw up pen on paper.

But that’s just the surface of the issue. Plenty of games go with old-school designs when the people making them are more than capable of producing a modern man-explosion simulator with graphics to match. Usually, this is a deliberate stylistic choice as opposed to compensation for lacking any talent with drawing/rendering. For example, I for one find it highly unlikely that absolutely nobody at Mojang is capable of drawing anything other than squares for Minecraft. They stick with squares because the entire theme of the game is squares, and the introduction of, say, trapezoids might baffle any experienced player of the game.

The main reason people go with it as a stylistic choice in the first place is mainly because of the assumptions people tend to make when they’re able to count and name individual sprites. Games like the original Megaman or Contra were made during a different time, when you didn’t need to think about why a platform would be floating in midair, and narratives were generally covered in a single paragraph that had been cribbed from some graffiti on a bathroom wall.

That’s why, if you want to invoke any of the tropes that were prevalent in the days when logic and reason were shot on sight in game studios, it’s not a bad idea to try and mimic the art style that those games used. If a game uses a realistic art style and you see a floating platform, you’re going to wonder why it’s there. After all, if I walked into a restaurant in real life and saw a floating platform, I’d sure as hell demand to see the manager. If a game uses an abstract art style and you see a floating platform, you generally write it off as a necessity of the gameplay without much thought. But if a game uses an oldschool art style and you see a floating platform, you don’t question it at all because you’ve already leaped onto it and are planning your expedition onto the next one. It’s floating for the same reason that pizza you just ate healed all of your physical ailments: because it’s an oldschool game, and runs on a special kind of logic all its own.