MacPaint Art from the Mid-80s Still Looks Great Today

There's a term I read about a long time ago, I think it was "aesthetic completeness" or something like that. It was used in the context of video games whose art direction was fully realized in the game, i.e. increases in graphics hardware or capabilities wouldn't add anything to the game in an artistic sense. The original Homeworld games were held up as examples.

Anyway, this reminded me of that. Making these pictures in anything but the tools of the time wouldn't just change them, they'd be totally different artworks. The medium is part of the artwork itself.

Hm, are you sure that there is not some nostalgia at play here?

To me they look horribly pixelated and at least some would improve aesthetically a lot for me with a higher resolution.

Even today these pictures have an almost perfect resolution for showing on a compact e-paper display. The viewing area on the original Mac models was not that much bigger, either. They only look "horribly pixelated" when artificially upscaled for a modern big screen.

(A pixel-art specific upscaling filter would mitigate that issue, of course.)

I was viewing them via a small mobile screen, not high DPI, not fullscreen. And to me, they simply don't look good the way they are.

But if you folks enjoy them, go for it. Otherwise taste is subjective I think.

It's amazing what people achieved with the resources of the '80s, creating fairly enjoyable visuals using extremely limited technology.

Another example from the early '90s is MARS.COM (1) by Tim Clarke (1993). Just 6 kilobytes and 30+ fps on a 12MHZ 286 (2).

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_zSjpIyMt0k

2. https://github.com/matrix-toolbox/MARS.COM/blob/main/MARS.AS...

I have to imagine that fully realizing a vision can only truly take place when the artists are not working at the limits of the present day tools. I’m thinking of something like games today that choose an art style and run with it, rather than trying to push the hardware as hard as possible.

Was this the artist’s vision, or were they simply making the best of the tools they had?

The same holds true for everything from cave paintings to Roman frescos. It's part of human expression. The tools of that expression shape it.

For example, Bach's music was shaped by the fact that the harpsichord had no sustain. The piano changed that, but "upscaling" Bach's work to take advantage of this new technology would destroy them. You use the new technology to play them as they were written for the old. The beauty comes through despite the change.

Pixel art is very much still around today, even though it's far from "pushing" the limits of current hardware. It's pursuing a rather consistent "vision" of maximizing quality while staying within the bounds of a predefined level of detail (i.e. resolution) and color depth.

Right. This is kind of what I’m talking about. Someone choosing pixel art today is making a choice; they have a vision. 40 years ago, they were limited by the system. The choice was largely made for them.

Old video games come to mind. The box art would be drastically different than the look of the game. The box art was the vision, the game was what they ended up with after compromises due to the hardware of the day. I think it’s only been in the last decade or so that some game makers have truly been able to realize the visions they had 40 years ago.

Of course there's a subjective element, but I was born about a decade after these were created and I find them to be beautiful. I love the mural with the tree, it's amazing how it creates a sense of openness that wants me to go outside, even with such a limited palette.

Vib Ribbon is one example I can think of that also exhibits that property.

You have no idea on how charming these games look.

Switched on Bach is one of my favorite albums of all time.

Similarly, Liszt made full use of what modern, powerful pianofortes are capable of - although were he a man of our times, he’d probably have been fronting a heavy metal band.

Or I do, because I played them?

But that was my not well received point about nostalgia ..

It is definitely amazing what they pioneered and achieved with the given limits.

But that doesn't mean I would enjoy a pixelated image now more than a high resolution image of the same motive.

I think of the box art and physical manual of a video game like Diablo from 1996, compared to the game itself. The manual had several detailed drawings of monsters and otherworldly creatures with a very "evil" look, but the game itself they were represented as blocky sprites with fairly comical movement, as characters moved on a isometric chessboard-style grid, with abrupt turns and limited speed. Ultimately the gameplay is what mattered, the box art, in-game music and sound effects all created an atmosphere that wouldn't have been as immersive with just graphics.

A point of comparison would be to the game Quake, which came out the same year, and whose graphics felt light years ahead . But Quake mostly became a multiplayer hit, as the single-player story and overall atmosphere weren't very compelling.

Looks like return of the obra dinn! Which was obviously targeting this look on purpose.

There are also some great blog posts by the obra dinn guy about 1-but dithering. They make the rounds on HN once in a while

Thats an interesting concept. Considering it, the big first party titles certainly had stellar presentation art-wise. Doesn't seem like they were limited in achieving their vision in say, sonic the hedgehog. Even the later games with pseudo-3d the art direction makes it feel complete and like it fits the aesthetic.

And even the new ones that have gone back to that style have the same 'look'(obviously because they're trying to be like those old games) but the graphical fidelity doesn't seem to change much beyond more pixels.

I think most indie developers choose pixel art (and low-poly 3D) today because they still can’t produce high-quality high-detail art, and high-quality pixel art is prettier than low-quality high-detail art.

It’s still a case where the developer can’t truly express their vision, but they can express it behind a filter, in this case pixelation, that makes our brains charitably fill in the missing details.

Although I’m sure for some games it is part of their vision, because there’s something intrinsically pretty about pixel art and low-poly 3D. Likewise there are 2D games like Cuphead that emulate “cartoon” style, and 3D games like Guilty Gear that emulate 2D anime; those are much harder than making a 2D or 3D game with traditional modern graphics.

I'd say that the nearly opposite is often true: the limitations shape art and even make it art. The masterful handling of limitations, and doing apparently impossible, is a legitimate part of art.

Academic Western poetry shed the metre and the rhyme in an attempt to be free from limitations and more fully express things. Can you quote something impressive? OTOH rap, arguably the modern genre of folk poetry, holds very firmly to the limiting metre and rhyme, and somehow stays quite popular. If rappers did not need rhyme as a tool of artistic expression, they probably would abandon it, instead of becoming sophisticated at it.

Same with pixel art, and other forms of pushing your medium to the limits, and beyond.

Games from Neo Geo were pixel art of very high quality. Just check Garou.

I didn't play them. but I owned a Game Boy in late 90's and I emulated 8-16 bit microcomputer/console games in 2001-2005, and I really appreaciated them.

It’s interesting to think about the intersection of cultural, technology and aesthetic.

Gaming embraces most of its historical aesthetics while say movies do not. There aren’t serious attempts to replicate the aesthetic of 50’s tv (which are tied in heavily with the culture of the time) similarly, jn the eighties and I imagine prior, I’ve been watching Miami vice and you can tell lots of the rooms are cheap sets with pretty minimal props. This is on the one hand definetly not full formed, but on the other hand I’ve grown to appreciate that aesthetic, And again other art forms like painting and video games seem to appreciate all eras of aesthetics in their modern versions in a Way tv and movies don’t. (Maybe just due to expense?)

I think a slightly different way to think about it is that it’s not always contest for maximum detail. Apple’s new liquid glass look is impressive, but is it necessarily better UI than System 9? I think you could have a reasonable debate about that.

Western classical music had a strong tradition of taking advantage of cutting edge technological advances, especially in metallurgy but also advanced woodworking techniques like lamination making large soundboards possible and pushing the bounds of acoustic amplification.

It wasn't until I think around the advent of recorded music and electric amplification that it settled into a fairly stable set of instruments & sounds produced by them.

Switched-on Bach is a revelation in part because the synth bass tones are more focused, distinct, and identifiable than when the same notes are played on acoustic instruments — allowing you to hear harmonic interplay which I believe is closer to what Bach heard in his head.

But here are lots of Bach synth albums and only Wendy Carlos’ work has the taste and obsessive fidelity to the original compositions to allow those ideas to come through. Most synth Bach falls into the trap of being idiomatic synth rather than idiomatic Bach, akin to playing Bach on the piano without considering how it would have sounded on the harpsichord.

I was also considering the effect of how silent computing used to be. It created a tension and expectation when waiting for an image to appear like waiting for a curtain to open on a play. So when the artwork appeared, the artists worked to make it beautiful. It was almost pushing the edge of what these systems could do, and so as a viewer placed you in an engaging experience right at the state of the art.

Maybe recency bias cause I’m playing it right now, but Breath of the Wild comes to mind

Understanding this point about cave paintings is crucial to not being a human piece of garbage.

You should take a listen to Tomita as well then! There is so much beautiful music in the world

It might be but it's hard to tell because it's such a recent game. The Wind Waker might be a better example because it's now 20 years old and still renders and plays basically as if it's current gen on modern hardware.

I am not a game purist and modern games are just fine, but I do not see the point of AAA games employing 300 artists to model blades of grass that have no gameplay effect. Sure, the screen shots lot great but unless you are making GrassSimulator2000 it would have been better to use those resources for something else.

I don't know, I think some improved hardware would greatly improve the aesthetics of the Lost Woods, which severely drops in frame rate when docked. Handheld, the diminished fidelity at 720p buys back some frames.

I'd be inclined to agree about some older Zelda games though, namely Wind Waker. I replayed it on GCN recently, and can attest that HD Wii U version really didn't add anything to the aesthetics.

Way too much, in fact, if we go by daily Spotify uploads.

Settled, or ossified? Sure, there’s modern classical with more adventurous instrumentation, but that’s not what the moneyed retirees down at the opera house want to hear.

The music of the classical canon is unbelievably fantastic, and it deserves respectful treatment, but the genre has lost the audience for cool new sounds. It’s very unfortunate.

Classical and jazz just stopped trying and standardized the instruments. Other types of music are more open to incorporating new instruments. At least that's how I feel.

Except Wind Waker is actually a good and a bad example. Its art style has not aged but the HD remaster (on Wii U) is still better looking.

There's a solid chance GTA VI will include a lawn mowing minigame.

As a person who spent a great deal of time restoring a long neglected backyard to include a small lawn to play on, I am interested in playing GrassSimulator2000.

Neither, I’d argue. The greats that we look back at were the outliers, the madmen at the fringe. For every Beethoven or Mozart there were a thousand thousand nobodies cranking out the same stuff that their grandfathers wrote. Rachmaninov was seen as nouveau trash in his time, Holst derided, Gershwin hackneyed. Eno perhaps falls into the same category.

Hell, in a century you’ll see string quartets banging out Aphex Twin at elegant soirées. The real connoisseurs, of course, nod knowingly and mutter that drukqs is “early period”.

Similarly, plainsong was seen as “classical” music for many centuries, and was also a largely rigid form, but there exist some absolute bangers in the canon, mostly unattributed because monks.

It’s hard to see the sweep of history from within it.

Yeah I actually used that word as I wrote it, and then switched it so I wouldn't come across as judgmental or anticlassical or whatever. I think it's a valid view of it. But my perspective here is that this kind of music is basically german-french elite traditional ethnic music. And as I don't negatively judge for example gamelan or carnatic or gagaku music for being settled/ossified I shouldn't judge traditional european music for that either.

It's simply not the role of any one musical practice to be at the forefront of experimentation forever. What we now call classical passed its torch on generations ago, and rock & jazz have now settled in too. We have hip hop and electronic music taking this role now, and eventually they will bind up into their own conventions and some descendant of theirs will push on.

Awesome, thanks. Had an inkling whatever Spotify came up with wasn’t right—thank you TIA for Wendy Carlos’s 1968 original!:

https://archive.org/details/wendy-carlos-witched-on-bach

(have to donate to Internet Archive again now…) anyway Wiki says this album essentially brought the Moog/synths from experimental to popular music. In a lovely fashion, my ears do say.

FWIW the jazz tradition is still alive and well, it just isn't normally called that in the interest of not being confused with the still-extant "traditional" jazz and because many of the musicians consider themselves to be primarily part of some other community.

But there is an absolutely thriving collaboration- and improvisation-based music form grounded in jazz but open to novel & experimental instrumentation and ripe with influence from other contemporary forms like pop, hip hop, funk, reggaeton, metal. I'm thinking of people like thundercat, kamasi washington, nuclear power trio, tigran hamasyan, robert glasper, sungazer, domi & jd beck, louis cole etc.

If you like the sound of old school jazz, the standup bass the piano the brush drum shuffle, this stuff will be alien and hostile and won't feel like jazz to you. But if you like the musicianship of jazz, watching masters collaboratively invent new music in real time, this is where that ended up.

I definitely listened to a lot of Tomita as a kid, I used to check out vinyls of his albums from my local library. The one that sticks with me most distinctly is his very unique rendition of Golliwog’s Cakewalk. https://youtube.com/watch?v=dPQ9d10fnko But yeah, lots of other great stuff from him too.

I have this same ontological debate with myself, I settle it by having a rather stricter definition of classical music. Classical music is popular music that has remained popular for longer than two generations of listeners. Music that follows that certain large scale form is orchestral music.(or whatever sub genre it is)

This annoying behavior does not win me any friends but remember that the great classical composers were the rock stars of their day.

I get your point. Truth is on both ends though. There truly are games which peaked in their visual style and even with modern power at their disposal nothing could be added that would make them look better. The medium they used, some of them, they used it to its maximum potential. I'd take pixel art's swan song game of Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. Modern rendition of it with let's say more detailed graphics, even vector one, would just make it look worse. It's perfect the way it is and I'd argue if you were to do it today and you chose the same art style, it'd come out the same with only smaller differences (like overall high resolution but still "subdivided" into smaller ones, effectively still being lower resolution).

> but that’s not what the moneyed retirees down at the opera house want to hear.

The last (well only) time I was in an opera house the retirees were listing to Blue Öyster Cult.

Update:

Wendy Carlos is still with us at 85 years of age, but apparently hasn’t been able to press CDs for two decades, and hasn’t licensed her music for streaming. Her site links to CDs on Amazon, w/o new copies available. She sounds dope, even being an “accomplished solar eclipse photographer” per Wiki.

If anyone knows her I’m curious if someone could help her preserve/distribute these beautiful sounds. (Maybe they’re all preserved but just not distributed, and maybe she’s chillin’ and doesn’t need another cent so it’d just be hassle—wanted to throw it all out there for y’all.)

—

…thanks OP for the great art btw, since I haven’t mentioned it yet. Stood the test of time!

The Switch 2 update seems to have resolved every performance complaint I had with TotK, if you're willing to pay the price of admission.

A lesser known title that I think hit that perfectly is Rez. So much so that the re-release almost 15 years later was for the most part, just higher resolution and cleaner rendering. But the overall style was not touched one bit.

I get the aesthetics of pixel art games. And I would likely not enjoy modern remakes of them. My point above was just, that I do admire those arts as great of their time - but looking at them today like in the picture above, I simply don't like the pixel style as an art style on its own.

This reminds me of how the pixel version of Chicago font looks great but the vector version doesn't.

https://x.com/susankare/status/1599662756252483585?s=46

Taking this parallel further, perhaps oil paintings are not as sharp as digital photos of the same subject.

There's one, soon to be released, which is highly anticipated https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IkMFYMG3QLw

> remember that the great classical composers were the rock stars of their day.

I don't have a source for this but I hear it a lot and I strongly suspect it is a historiographical myth. Pretty much only a very small minority urban (relative) elite had access to live professionally performed classical music during most periods when it was being composed. This is also the group whose writings form most of our current knowledge base about these periods, and whose writings are of course focused primarily on their own interests. We can't really see what they didn't see, or didn't care enough to write about.

But contemporaneous with this elite music there were european folk music traditions, taught and performed ad hoc by individuals or small ensembles in homes and gathering places of the vast majority of "normal" people (peasant farmers, later urban laborers), and including some traveling performers who were known by reputation.

So yeah the great classical composers were wildly popular among the people who listened to the kind of music that they composed, but that was an extremely small part of the population. We don't have very much information at all about what was going on musically with the greater part of the population, but it appears to have been a completely separate thing, it's doubtful the great composers had any name recognition among the vast peasant masses.

What does this hair split accomplish? We have to settle on something.

Do the swords still break every 39 seconds?

Well, it’s either mental issues, or this is the way she wants it. I assume the latter. She had connections. There are people even today who would throw themselves at her feet to make it happen. She was instrumental in helping Bob Moog make the synthesizer workable for musicians, according to Bob Moog. She did the original Tron soundtrack.

Many new games are released today with pixel art because that's the aesthetic they want to portray.

Some games, like Borderlands or Wind Waker, use aggressive cell shading. They age like wine, because the game has a distinct art style that gives it character.

To be fair, they did say "performance" complaints. :)

Sounds like they're describing Interstate 76.

Oh wow! I have not heard that name in a while! ( and yes, I know I still haven't heard it outside my own head, but that is just a nit to pick..)

Mars. That track is so great! All of them are, but that one shows off so many great synth techniques. One passage is noise that ramps. The spectral distribution changes, from emphasis on low notes to emphasis on high notes while the overall energy remains close to the same.

I remember it because I have never heard anyone else do that in a composition.

Recommendation seconded!

I really like the 2 Bach synth albums by Marco Rosano.

Awesome.

& I’m going with your assumption! Thanks for the positive perspective & background.

When id was pushing the envelope of technology (mid to late 90s) and creating more and more startling games, I remember thinking that none of them really had the appeal of many of the earlier games. And apparently Carmack thought that the story etc. of the game wasn't important. Reading masters of DOOM and watching my 8 year old play DOOM on an emulator made me reconsider. He had a jumpscare in a way that would have been impossible unless the game was so immersive and that is a technological feat. I do agree with you that one can go too far but it's not wholly a pointless side quest.

Why? Says who? Historians find that our understanding of the past is never complete, and always open to reevaluation based on new information or techniques. I agree with them.

Do you think you could find the article? It sounds super interesting.

I tried Claude and it mentioned the term might actually be „Aesthetic sufficiency“, but I couldn‘t find an essay with Homeworld on it.

Your opinion isn't popular, but I agree with you. Taking just the first image as an example... this is a digital recreation/modification of a Saul Steinberg cover for the New Yorker originally done in 1976. This cover created a extremely popular subgenre of stylized map drawing at the time, but the Mac version looks like mostly clip art images all splodged together with no real sense of composition or perspective. There are many other examples in here which I feel were made by people who happened to have access to the technology, but did not necessarily have great artistic ability.

That being said, although there are also some extremely good examples in here (in my subjective opinion), I absolutely think there is a nostalgia element at play. I worked on these machines in the 80s and feel that nostalgia myself.

Yes indeed! "The medium is the message" - Marshall McLuhan. Although you could also argue that "The interface is the message"