PIXEL PERFECT

There’s a shift happening in the way people think about videogames inspired by years gone by. As the quality of the pixel art in Square Enix’s Final Fantasy remasters sparks hot debate, interest in how display technologies impact on game art is buoyed by the likes of the popular CRT Pixels Twitter account and the market grows for products that help people get better image quality from vintage consoles on modern displays, there’s a related trend emerging for developers to push the inspiration they take from the videogames of the ’80s and ’90s to new extremes. Not very long ago, giving a game a retro vibe involved simply rendering it with pronounced pixels. Nowadays, it goes a lot deeper than that.

Modern videogames taking inspiration from old ones is, of course, nothing new: after the indie gaming boom of the late 2000s, we were inundated with 16bit-inspired pixel art games. Over time, however, pixel art has transformed from being synonymous with retro revivalism to become an aesthetic of its own. In videogames such as Narita Boy, Demon Throttle, Arcade Paradise, Cursed Castilla, Super Hydorah and Blazing Chrome, we’re seeing a move to re-establish that connection to the past by going way beyond simply using pixel art to evoke times gone by. These games attempt to emulate the look and even the sound of the technology of earlier eras, leaving us in no doubt about their desire to transport us to another time. What is motivating developers to push things to another level, and how are they achieving it?

For , creative director of , from Spanish team Studio Koba, the answer is deeply personal. “I made a retro-influenced game because I wanted to explore my own experience from that time, when I played as a kid on the arcade cabinets in my village in the summers of the ’80s,” he says. “I wanted to talk about nostalgia, as a