Pixel art was more or less essential throughout the ’80s due to the low-powered hardware of the time, but saw a rapid decline with the introduction of 3D-capable home consoles like the Sony PlayStation and Nintendo 64. But in the second half of the last decade, pixel art started coming back in the shape of retro revivals like Contra 4 and Mega Man 9, games that felt like they’d been made 15 or 20 years earlier. The Nintendo DS was a particularly good canvas for pixel art, and the concurrent rise of download services on home consoles proved another great fit for 2D games. That’s something that’s only likely to continue with the ease of indie publishing on newer consoles and mobile platforms; games with lower budgets naturally suit simpler graphics.
THE STYLE DOESN'T HAVE TO SIGNIFY NOSTALGIA
But while the term "pixel art" is often used synonymously with "retro," the style doesn’t have to signify nostalgia — or vice versa. Some of the most retro games around eschew pixel art entirely, in fact. Shadow Complex has all the trappings of a AAA title that uses the Unreal Engine and features the voice of Uncharted’s Nathan Drake, but it plays almost exactly like Nintendo’s 1994 classic Super Metroid. Nintendo’s own New Super Mario Bros. games blend detailed 2D graphics with 3D characters, but the postmodernist title says it all — it’s a throwback to the NES and SNES Super Mario titles before the Nintendo 64 changed everything. Now Nintendo saves its 80s pixel art for original titles like Mario Maker and NES Remix, placing the aging sprites in a brand-new context.
Instead, pixel art is best thought of as video gaming’s most characteristic visual style, one that was forged throughout the history of the medium and is inextricably linked to it. "I’m interested in making work that feels visually at home on a computer," says Jason Rohrer, whose experimental indie games like Passage (above) and Gravitation were among the first to bring the question of "games as art" to a wider audience. "I don't want to make things that look like watercolor paintings or crayon drawings, for example. I came to see pixel art as a kind of digitally native cartooning." In Passage, the pixels themselves can be seen to serve a storytelling purpose, with glitchy effects and simple color changes helping to show how the protagonist shuffles through life.
"Pixel art doesn't always spell everything out," agrees Saltsman. "It can be pretty minimalist and evocative that way. Often when you are looking at pixel art you are seeing more than is actually there." Less is often more: the more detail an artist adds to a character, the less freedom the player has to "fill in the blanks," as Vella puts it. "For Passage and Gravitation, I actually experimented with various resolutions for the characters," says Rohrer, who tried sprites of 8 x 8, 16 x 16, and 32 x 32 pixels. "As I added more detail through more pixels — noses, ears, and fingers, for example — I found that they became more and more specific looking and less easy to identify with." Ultimately Rohrer decided to go with the simplest characters, featuring one-pixel eyes as part of a 2 x 2 face.
But that’s not to say that there’s no room for further innovation or expression within the form. "There are so many talented pixel artists that I would be flabbergasted if we weren’t surprised time and time again with how far, and how wide, the medium can be pushed," says Vella, who cites games like Sword and Sworcery and Hyper Light Drifter as examples of pixel art works that no one saw coming; the latter game is a neon-streaked, Kickstarter-funded RPG that's impossible to imagine on hardware from the last millennium. "As long as someone tries to do something totally bonkers in pixels, we’ll see it last," says Vella. "Would Super Time Force look the same if we had started it 20 years later? Who knows. But I am certain that pixel art is neither a fad, nor a static medium."
"I AM CERTAIN THAT PIXEL ART IS NEITHER A FAD, NOR A STATIC MEDIUM."
As video games’ most defining visual style, pixel art is here to stay, even if it might not give your PS4 the best workout possible. And there’s no telling where the form might go next. "I am certain there are a group of gamers who are turned off by a game using pixel art on their fancy new Xbox One or PS4," says Vella. "And that’s totally okay. Art is entirely subjective, and people like what they like. We’re not worried about the players that don’t care about our games, or our art. We care about those that do.
