If you have followed the indie gaming scene closely for the last couple of years, you might have noticed how games have adopted the 8-bit art style at an ever increasing pace. Games like Minecraft, Fez and of course Terraria have all incorporated and built their graphics engine on this art style. People seem to really enjoy it as well. It might be because these games bring back memories from when people where young. It is also a way for game developers to lower their developing costs and allow more people to be able to play the games since the spec requirements are infinitely less than for a complex 3D engine big budget game. The question really is, where did it start and where it is heading in the future?
A new short documentary goes through the ages and stages of the 8-bit art style, and why this particular cultural phenomenon came to be in the first place. It’s quite simple really, and anyone who has ever had the opportunity to program and mess around with a Commodore 64 or a Spectrum knows that the resources at your disposal were low, thus making any kind of complicated graphics show up on screen quite impossible.
Personally, I am one of the people who loves this kind of art style. It is ultimately “refreshing,” if I could be so bold as to use that particular word. It’s nice to see this retro approach in a new, more fluent execution and with a new set of tools to make it even more innovative. If we take Fez, for example, which is a new widely successful indie game, it incorporates 3D graphics with the 8-bit style in a way that we have never seen before. It is combinations like this that really make game development so exciting. Enjoy a journey through the ultimate world of 8-bit retro art and music.
Via: [UFunk – French]
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