Atomic Robo-Kid
Moto Roader
Mr Heli
Samurai Ghost
Super Volleyball
Tiger Road
The answer is 256-color (8-bit) palette.
You guys should check out OpenBOR, it’s an open source game engine for beat’em-ups. (It uses 256 colors at max per game so they’re pretty colorful).
Yeah lemme get a hit of what you’re smoking… I would argue modern games have a heavy over saturation of ridiculously colorful games. Look at the popular titles of like every major genre within the last few years and tell me that’s not the case.
Shooters- Fortnite, Valorant, Apex, The finals, Splatoon (cod being the only major shooter with a drab palette)
Car/Racing- Mario kart, Forza, rocket league, that one game everyone overlays on TikTok videos with the crazy winding tracks
Fighting- Street fighter, Tekken, MK, Smash, Guilty gear (all very colorful or at least significantly more colorful than the previous iterations)
Indies- Hades, hollow knight, cult of the lamb, pizza tower, stardew valley, undertale, subnautica, vampire survivors, ori
Pandemic hits everyone obsessed over, among us and fall guys.
Marvel snap is the biggest entry into the card game market, which has been dominated by none other than Hearthstone for a while now.
The only genre I can think of that doesn’t have an excess of color is rpg’s, with the new Zeldas, baldur’s gate 3, starfield, elden ring, last of us, etc being a bit neutral, (still not dull by any means) but even with that being said things like spider man, palworld, and cyberpunk exist.
Anyway, yeah this list got a lot longer than I planned but I think it illustrates my point.
There was definitely a period in the Xbox 360/PS3 era where everything was a drab grey and brown with a godawful bloom effect on everything. We do seem to be past that now, thankfully.
Might also have to do with the display used - games are mastered for HDR and SDR, and I find that I have to be much more precise with color correction than I was with older games; Helldivers 2 needs more saturation in game for me
Also, perceived contrast varies widely between the different types of LCD monitors
Question that might sound dumb.
Were they actually this vibrant back then or were they made more vibrant to make up for limitations of a CRT?
Nope, they weren’t. But there were definitely differences whether you played on a Sony Trinitron or a cheap TV. Hell, I even played some games on black-white-TV when the color TV wasn’t available.
The system could only display 400-something colors at a time. Once you reduce the number of colors that can be used, you lose gradients so one color doesn’t ease into another color. Due to this, art styles were typically different and used contrast to “pop” the characters and items visuals in game since being more realistic wasn’t an easy (or possible) option.
Now that we can have millions of colors, you can do whatever style you want.
A similar thing happened as polygon counts went up.
