If you’ve been alive in the past fifty years or so, you’ve played a video game. It’s a primarily visual art form that uses current-day technologies to provide ever-evolving gaming experiences across generations.
This new series of short, ten-minute videos written and produced by Stuart Brown aim to take a closer look at the evolution of video game graphics, from the simple monochromatic lines of Pong to the incredibly rich and detailed photo realism of today’s games like Crysis, Destiny, and Far Cry 4.
“Graphics are absolutely important,” says Brown in the fifth and final video. “They are an essential part of video games. A window into another world and a prime indicator of the technology that powers it.”
Check out the first two installments below.
In this first segment, Brown explores the first uses of video game visual technology, explaining bitmaps, raster images, and vectors. There’s a charm in these first forays into gaming on a screen, especially from our advanced perspective now. Color graphics was the first exciting technological jump of the initial era, and games like 1979’s Galaxian.
In part two, we’re introduced to sprites, the way game developers created moving characters on the screen. as visual and storage technology improved, so did the detail and color palette of the sprite-based video game characters.
Be sure to check out all five of the videos in Brown’s YouTube playlist, and check out the discussion behind the scenes on Reddit.
Rob LeFebvre is an Anchorage, Alaska-based writer and editor who has contributed to various tech, gaming and iOS sites, including 148Apps, Creative Screenwriting, Shelf-Awareness, VentureBeat, and Paste Magazine. Feel free to find Rob on Twitter @roblef, and send him a cookie once in a while; he’ll really appreciate it.
One response to “From pixels to polygons: The fascinating evolution of video game graphics”
I agree that graphics are important, but they are overemphasized now. Developers aren’t spending enough time on making a great game, rather they are spending their time making a crappy to medicre game look awesome.
If you know the history of video games, you can have just as much fun playing games like Starcon, Archon, or Street Fighter which didn’t have incredible graphics.
Archon, arguably one of the greatest games ever, should be remade. I have no idea why someone hasn’t taken that idea and run with it. It’s the only game out there that includes a combination of strategic skills (it’s played on a chess board part of the time), hand to hand combat (it is played on an open field the other part of the time), and luck (changing of the seasons where the color of the square they are standing on can give or take away health points giving the opponent an advantage or disadvantage).