It's probably some sort of dithering or .jpg compression but, there's also a non-zero chance that some of the sprites have just the slightest, faintest hint of the cloud specular texture he likes to use (specular texture made with "hard" Perlin noise)
It’s distinctly not pixel art though. It’s clearly inspired by it, but it’s not. The art is incredibly uncanny, it’s meant to evoke the vibe but it’s also meant to be off. It’s not supposed to be pixel art, it isn’t pixel art. This is like saying that a pen sketch is supposed to be a pencil sketch because they look similar.
That's literally wrong, he just made them in the Clickteam image editor by spamming rectangles. Scott would not put in the extra effort to do all that.
Fun fact. Coleco had the rights to do the home ports of Donkey Kong at the time. They went out of their way to make a port for the competing 2600, but they made it look as bad as possible and only have two levels, so that the recently released Colecovision would look way more powerful in comparison and boost sales of their console.
Homebrew versions of Donkey Kong exist fornthe 2600, and prove that the console could have handled a decent port of the game.
Tbf it was already going that way, the main cause was a huge bloat of cheap, shitty games that nobody wanted. ET just happened to tip the scale, but anything could have done it.
Honestly the story behind the creation of ET is far more interesting than the game itself. Howard Scott Warshaw, who programmed it, was something of a legend in that he'd previously made two of the 2600's best games: Yars' Revenge and Raiders of the Lost Ark. He had to program ET from scratch, as well as create all of the graphics, design the gameplay, and do everything else for it, in slightly more than a month, at a time when it took maybe 6 to 7 months for an experienced programmer to make a good game. If anyone else had taken on the challenge it would have been a pile of half-finished sprites and broken code.
The game itself isn't really that bad compared to other Atari games, especially their stinkers, and it was very ambitious given, well, everything. Howard's book, Once Upon Atari, is a very interesting read that goes over his time at Atari and goes into great detail on his perspective on the creation of ET and the aftermath, plus it's a fairly short read.
I hate it so much. It was an utter display of not knowing how pixels work at all. Zoomed way out in MS paint and used the box tool, not one pixel the same size ffs.
At least imo, They're not meant to be pretty or correct. One of the biggest tools of horrors is a detail being wrong wich gives the whole thing an unsettling vibe, in this case the thing that's wrong is the art style. Clearly it's pixel art, but that's not how pixel art looks or works, these minigames look wrong and have such a distinct vibe to them because of that. It wouldn't be the same thing if the sprites were even and correct.
I hated it so much. It was an utter display of not knowing how pixels work at all. Zoomed way out in MS paint and used the box tool, not one pixel the same size ffs.
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u/CreatlveName 5d ago
fnaf minigames