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

(blog.decryption.net.au)
1034 points decryption | 18 comments | 12 Jul 25 08:45 UTC | HN request time: 1.078s | source | bottom
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seabombs ◴[12 Jul 25 10:57 UTC] No.44541090[source]▶
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.

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1. lukan ◴[12 Jul 25 11:13 UTC] No.44541180[source]▶
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.

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2. zozbot234 ◴[12 Jul 25 11:20 UTC] No.44541215[source]▶
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.)

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3. lukan ◴[12 Jul 25 12:15 UTC] No.44541536[source]▶
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.

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4. ◴[12 Jul 25 12:51 UTC] No.44541710{3}[source]▶
5. reconnecting ◴[12 Jul 25 12:53 UTC] No.44541724{3}[source]▶
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...

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6. ◴[12 Jul 25 13:31 UTC] No.44541934[source]▶
7. fwipsy ◴[12 Jul 25 13:38 UTC] No.44541982[source]▶
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.
8. anthk ◴[12 Jul 25 14:25 UTC] No.44542308[source]▶
You have no idea on how charming these games look.
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9. lukan ◴[12 Jul 25 14:45 UTC] No.44542433[source]▶
Or I do, because I played them?

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

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10. lukan ◴[12 Jul 25 14:49 UTC] No.44542461{4}[source]▶
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.

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11. chamomeal ◴[12 Jul 25 15:04 UTC] No.44542557[source]▶
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

12. anthk ◴[12 Jul 25 15:43 UTC] No.44542853{3}[source]▶
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.
13. Keyframe ◴[12 Jul 25 20:14 UTC] No.44544777{3}[source]▶
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).
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14. lukan ◴[12 Jul 25 21:54 UTC] No.44545518{4}[source]▶
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.
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15. reconnecting ◴[12 Jul 25 22:59 UTC] No.44545927{5}[source]▶
Taking this parallel further, perhaps oil paintings are not as sharp as digital photos of the same subject.
16. Keyframe ◴[12 Jul 25 23:31 UTC] No.44546131{5}[source]▶
There's one, soon to be released, which is highly anticipated https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IkMFYMG3QLw
17. const_cast ◴[13 Jul 25 04:04 UTC] No.44547388[source]▶
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.

18. tumnus ◴[13 Jul 25 22:33 UTC] No.44554394[source]▶
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.