prokopetz:

Folks tend to talk about fidelity in retro game visual design in terms of adhering to the limitations of particular consoles, but I think keeping in mind where they weren’t limited is at least as important. When a console could do something that previous console generations – or its current competitors – couldn’t, its developers tended to want to show that off, and while these effects are often thoroughly unremarkable to contemporary audiences, they’re a big part of each console’s distinctive “feel”. For example, the NES only had one tilemap plane, but it could decide whether to render sprites behind or in front of it on a per-sprite basis, so you get a lot of games with complicated set-piece levels where the player character walks behind a foreground object. The Super Nintendo, conversely, could do multiple independently scrolling tilemaps for not a lot of resoruces, so Super Nintendo games that are trying to wow players with their visuals love themselves some multi-plane parallax. This sort of “hey, look what we can do” showboating is just as essential to a console’s visual identity as having the right number of entries in your colour table.