Just like in movies and music, different aesthetics in videogames imply different levels of commercial ambition. See a film that's entirely in black and white with funny looking non-actors, or hear a song played with aggressive, sloppily played, distorted guitars, and you're likely to get the feeling that artists in question are more concerned with expressing their ideas than creating something with much potential for mainstream acceptance.
For a long time, "8-bit," low-res, made-by-hand sprite artwork has occupied that space in the videogame industry. See a new game that looks like something from the NES or Commodore 64 era of gaming, and you immediately think "indie."
Phil Fish, developer of the polygon/pixel hybrid game Fez, thinks that the association between sprite graphics and the indie scene may be changing. Here's why I think he's right.
Here's the full quote from Mr. Fish:
The reason pixel art is popular with hobbyist and independent developers is that it's fairly easy. It's manageable, and there are a lot of good tools out there. It's not just a retro-nostalgia thing. It just makes making 2D art assets that much easier, and as we start seeing more elaborate 3D games from hobbyists and independents, I think we're gonna start seeing a lot more stylized low-poly, no-texture Sega Saturn type 3D graphics. Again, not just for the retro kicks, but to keep 3D art asset creation manageable. Once you embrace that low-fi aesthetic, you simplify your life A LOT. It greatly lowers the bar of entry.
There's gonna be a huge revolution in 3D games soon as indies start experimenting more with what you can do with 3D space rather than spend 15 years making slightly more photo-realistic space marines running around on flat surfaces. All the time you won't spend painstakingly creating an over-elaborate sub-surface scattering map, is time you can spend really exploring the polygon. Here's a soundbite for you -- THE POLYGON IS THE NEW PIXEL.
Thanks for the soundbite, Phil. I'm going to take that bite and run with it.
When Mega Man 9 brought the 8-bit look back to the mainstream, it permanently changed the way gamers perceive the low-res sprite. For years, people associated the love of old-school graphics with a genuine love of gaming, bereft of intent to impress the masses or turn a profit.
When Mega Man 9 went on to make a huge profit, that all changed. "8-bit" was no longer seen as the visual language of the true videogame fan. Instead, they were seen as a fast an easy way to cash in on nostalgic adults in their 20s and 30s.
In short, 8-bit graphics have lost some of their "gamer cred." Sure, there are plenty of games that utilize this look to express a genuine love of gaming as a unique art form (Sword and Sworcery and Retro City Rampage are two examples that immediately come to mind), but on the whole, low-res sprites don't have the cultural significance that they used to.
It's sort of like how after Oprah used the term "bling bling," teenage gangstas immediately removed those words from their vocabulary. After 8-bit graphics started popping up in music videos, ads for the Black Eyed Peas, and TV commercials, they just weren't indie anymore.
That's where low-res polygons step in. Like Mr. Fish says, they have a lot of the same strengths as low-res sprites. It doesn't take a huge team or tons of money to create a game made of low-res polys, and in the right hands, they can look amazing.
Games like Minecraft, Toribash, Bit.Trip RUNNER, the games of Kenta Cho, and the Katamari series have proven that the "Voxel" look can resonate with a cross section of the gaming community. I hope that Mr. Fish is right in thinking that we'll be seeing more and more games embrace that look as time goes on.
It will be especially interesting to see if enough low-poly-looking games go mainstream, if they too will lose their indie cred. If so, what other look will step in to take their place? Could vector-based graphics make a comeback? Digitized "live-action" sprites like in the original Mortal Kombat games maybe?
As a fan of all types of graphics, I'd like to see an equal opportunity for every type of game to make it big, but could anyone ever want to play a game that looks like Pit Fighter ever again?
Contest:
2:00 PM on 05.16.2011 | 
that would lead to some really cornball, cheesy, niche parody games.
...i'm all for it.
I think its also about advancements in technology and what becomes more openly available to people. I think more people having access to better stuff now gives way for someone to be able to play with voxels (and lower poly-counts) more then, say, 5 years ago, and provides the opportunity to expand "indie" into a catagory it wasn't in before, in order to attempt forming a trend at all. This could mean that pixels or vectors could never make a resurgence, or it could mean that when they do make one they'll end up being even more mindblowing.
As for Pit Fighter, lol.. I didn't even need to think that hard to remember what THAT game looked like.. But idk.. I would almost like to see another stab at something more akin to Primal Rage.
The problem is when you make the next step to polygons. It goes from being something that a person with moderate artistic skill, a weekend, and paint can do, and makes it much harder. Was the transition to 3D necessary? Yes. Was it fun? Yes. Was it pretty? Not in the beginning. It is difficult to argue that early 3D games looked good.
Compare Super Mario Land to Mario 64. Both great games. At the time, they where top of the line graphics wise. But let us bring this to the modern day. If Nintendo was going to remake SML, all they would have to do is port it to whichever system they want, because it still looks great. But look at Mario 64, they HAD to redo the looks because it looked like ass, and people wouldn’t be happy. There was no way to get around it; polygons do not age nearly as well as straight up pixels.
But hey, these are just the ramblings of a senior, trying to put off doing his finals. Maybe when I have more time, I will try turning this into a full blow C-blog.
I do not think that 2D has lost its flair because megaman 9 sold well, that is a perposterus idea in the first place. If anything megaman 9 has introduced pixel art to a younger generation. Of coaurse we could talk forever about the topic and well with all mainstream art there are cridics that say thing that sell well are not art, and in fact history points out while they are not specifically important, they do make an impact on art in general.
I am exsited for the indi game Voxatron: which is completely made of voxels, and plays in the vein of robotron
However, I think that flat space is not going to disapear so quickly, mainly because if you think about it all the 2D side scrollers used mainly flat space, and most FPS also use flat space for prossesing issues. While our computers are much more powerful today they really cannot go that far yet, and even when they can go that far I do not think that it will be nessasary for gameplay.
I want their vision to be presented in the most accurate way possible.
I believe Blender revels in being obtuse and only semi-functional from a UI standpoint. For years, any complaints about the UI led to the defense that Blender was focused on maximum performance for skilled users, and that you should just learn the interface because the way Blender did it was better for everyone. (I vaguely recall one of the Blender tutorials pointing out that one particular useful feature, I think in regards to auto-saving, was effectively hidden in otherwise dead space of an equally hidden pull-down window. If you didn't read a tutorial, you might never realize the pull-down was there. If you did find the pull-down, you might not pull it downward enough to find the option.)
Strangely, when 2.5 was released, it had a major UI change that made it look like other 3D utilities. Also strangely, it still seemed to be only semi-functional from a UI standpoint. Things are there, but only half-realized. Like you can now move a panels window from the default horizontal orientation to vertical orientation, but the panel layouts and functionality are all arranged with the assumption that you will only use horizontal orientation. I spent a few minutes moving all the individual panels, only to find that it still just wasn't going to work the way I wanted, and went back to the default horizontal layout.
This is not to say I'm against exploring so-called "indie" polygons, in fact, having grown up in the 90's, I have my fair share of polygon-nostalgia, which is probably more warranted than my admittedly inappropriate pixel-nostalgia, so yeah, maybe this is a good thing. Alls I'm saying is that mainstreamanization changes nothing.
And guess what, people have already been doing this shit for years, before you fake ass hipster "indies" started trying to decide what is cool.
I think that will come across to anyone who plays Fez.
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