The Graphics, Part 1: The History.

Let's talk about art in games.

No, not like, whether games are art. But rather, the graphics of games.

Let's talk about.. whether graphics are good for games.

Hold on, put down the pitchfork. I'm not saying I want the old text adventure days back.

But with the rising costs of today's development, a major blockbuster game takes something like tens of millions of dollars to produce, must sell hundreds of thousands of copies, and a couple of years to produce. With the longer and longer development times, innovation is squelched for favor of stagnant copies...

I mean, it's a little hard to believe all this is worth it for the photo-realistic virtual tennis game I'm seeing. I had about a million times more fun playing Mario Tennis (with loveable, cartoony graphics) or Wii Sports (with.. shall we say.. rudimentary graphics) then I had playing 'Pro Super Awesome Tennis Supreme Champion with realistic commentary, skin tones, and character models.'

There's a cost to the demands of graphics. Let's see how this whole silly affair started...

Back in the day, you had your little raster graphic consoles. We're talking scanlines here. Your Atari-era days. And the era were programmers tried to out-do each other with fancier and fancier techniques for graphics. Back then, when you wanted to draw a line on the screen, it had to be all the same color and you had to plot out the entire horizontal axis. You couldn't draw a line and then go back and 'draw something before it.'

And there wasn't a frame buffer either. *shudder*

But then, programmers started to learn the tricks of the system. Changing color memory on the fly so they had characters with more than one color. More and more complex shapes and designs, as well as speed improvements and controls...

This was the golden-era of arcade gaming, so to speak. The lone developer who made the graphics, code, design and put it all together in a neat package to sell to the world. The first wave of graphic improvement, where programmers struggled to out-do each other in graphics pushing whatever hardware they were on to the fullest. However, this brand of playful competition was quickly squelched when new management came around and realized that this was a new possibility! A new market! A entirely new frontier...

...where you could pass off a tiny pixel as Spiderman and dupe people into buying a few hundred copies.

When you only had to sell a few hundred copies to break even.

Note, I said 'dupe.' Take a look at the ancient games of the 80's. They were all produced by a company. No individual programmer names made it on there. It was in fact, forbidden to put your name anywhere in the game. Initially, the programmers had free reign over what they produced, but as times changed (and profit margins grew...) so did policies. And thus it became that, it was company mandated policy to churn out... well... crap.

People were indeed duped back then to pay for the crummiest of games. When you pay 10 dollars for a Spiderman game, take it home to play, and realize that you're looking at a red dot swinging on some white dots across a square block of dots... You do indeed, feel quite silly at having bought it.

Especially if it played like a cross between washing the dishes.. and say.. slamming yourself in the head with a brick.

Imagine the crisis of faith the consumer population feels when exposed to this. Suddenly, it wasn't enough that you produced a new fancy video game. You had to ensure that it was actually worth buying. And what could the consumer possibly have to gauge the quality of the game from the box?

Screenshots, of course.

(Actually, one of the alternative solutions game companies tried to use was a ridiculous amount of hype. There was an Atari game called.. 'ET' based on.. guess what? ET. Awesome movie, terrible terrible terrible game. This game marked the end of the initial golden age of games, where people finally realized that the game companies at the time were out to simply dupe people into buying crap. The programmers rebelled of course, but the company had its say.

...and people joke about millions of unsold ET game cartridges ending up in a landfill...

...Snopes confirms it too.)

So the graphic console wars started. Because each game could only run on a very specific console, if you could convince the majority of the public to purchase your console, you would have your market audience for life playing your games. And thus games starting becoming graphical promotions for the consoles themselves. How would I know the Z9000 console would be better than the Atari 2600? How would I know the NES would be better than the Atari 7600? In a world where games were new, often disappointing affairs, people turned to graphics to help guide them. Screenshots of the newest technology. Look at all the pretty colors the Atari 2600 can do! Look at those beautiful lush greens and the man with the hat (Pitfall.)

This trend continued to the present day, where the major consoles are still fighting the graphics war. Each generation of consoles fighting for supremacy of.. who can pull off more sprites, the biggest explosions, the most realistic 3d graphics...

And where screenshots once ruled the day before, we turn to in-game videos or demos to see our beautiful games in action. The first thing we judge a game on is by graphics. Perhaps the only way we can judge a game without actually having played it. It's in our gut to judge a game by it's beautiful beautiful cover.

Where will it all lead to...