How did developers deal with the limitations in creating graphics in early video games 

Have you ever stopped to think about how video game graphics have evolved over time? From the 1970s on, a lot has changed in terms of the technology of game platforms. Nowadays much of the visual aesthetics of a game comes from the choice of the developers after art direction and game design definitions. But in the beginning, not everything that was defined could actually be executed. The hardware limitations in the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s necessitated creative solutions to achieve results that would catch the players’ attention.

The first generations of video games contained hardware with various memory and processing limitations. The entire game logic code and the graphics data had to fit on a few kilobytes, which was the available space on the cartridges. So how did the games deal with these restrictions and how did the graphics evolve over time? Let’s look at some examples.

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The Magnavox Odyssey is known as the first commercial video game in history. Released in 1972, this console has no dedicated processor, being implemented on diode-transistor logic. It is also unable to generate sounds, and the only graphics that can be generated are a vertical bar and three squares.

The composition of the graphics could be changed with game cartridges, but the console could not display more complex graphics. To try to solve this problem, games used to include overlays, which were transparent plastics that could be glued to the TV screen. These plastics contained illustrations according to the theme of the game, creating the illusion of graphics that the console hardware could not generate.

Some games were hybrids between digital game and board game, since the console cannot track scores or determine a winner digitally, this was all up to the players doing it analog.

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Moving on to 1977, the Atari 2600 was one of the first consoles with a dedicated processor, becoming the most popular video game of its time. 

The Atari 2600 hardware was designed to cut production costs as much as possible, with only four main chips. With no RAM for video, the graphics had to be generated at the same time they were displayed on the TV. This limitation made the process of creating images to be displayed on the screen complex, where developers had to write the code for the graphics line by line until they composed the entire image to be displayed on the screen. It was also necessary to include the game logic code in between the code creating the graphics, a process that became known as “Racing the beam”.

All this made the process of developing an Atari 2600 game very complex. In 1983 the large number of low-quality games broke the gaming market in the United States, a moment known as the video game crisis of 1983. 

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Meanwhile in Japan the Nintendo company released its first commercial console with interchangeable cartridges, the Famicom. Its American version, the NES (Nintendo Entertainment System) was responsible for restoring the gaming market from the crisis that had been established.

The NES brought advances in hardware compared to the Atari videogame. The console has an 8-bit processor and a dedicated chip for graphics generation.

The NES has a color palette of 54 colors and transparency, and you can display up to 25 colors at a time on the screen.

The system had restrictions, such as: the amount of elements that could be displayed on the screen at one time, the number of colors of each element, and the colors of the scenery. Scenery could not be rotated or flipped, and the scrolling effect was only possible using complex techniques. A sprite could contain only three colors and transparency, but some games made use of sprite overlay techniques to achieve more colors than the hardware allowed.

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In 1990 Nintendo released the Super Famicom, known as SNES (Super Nintendo Entertainment System) in Western countries. This console is the successor of the NES, and formed the 16-bit generation, bringing considerable advances for its time. The SNES has a 16-bit processor and two graphics processing units that work together, improving the initial concept of the NES graphics chip. It has a color palette of 32,768 colors, and can display up to 256 colors at a time. 

In addition, the console is able to extend its technical capability by means of enhancement chips contained in the game cartridges. It is these chips that made it possible to create games with 3D polygonal graphics, even though the SNES was considered to be a video game with 2D graphics.

Super Nintendo graphics are divided into 8 modes, each with specific characteristics and restrictions. Mode 7 differs from the others in that it allows you to create a background image and perform transformations, such as translating, scaling, rotating, reflecting, and shearing.

The image a) is the image generated by the graphics chip still without changes, b) shows how the layer looks after applying the transformations, simulating the perspective effect, and c) is the final rendering of the game.

The Mega Drive, also known as the Sega Genesis in the United States, is another 16-bit console that competed directly against the Super Nintendo in the fourth generation. First released in 1988, the console features two processors, a 16-bit processor for calculating game logic and graphics, and an 8-bit processor for audio processing. The processed graphics are rendered on a specific video chip.

The Mega Drive can display up to 61 colors out of a palette of 512 colors. With a relatively more limited palette than its competitor, developers used the analog television system of the time as a way to simulate the existence of more colors, creating graphics dependent on the analog display medium to produce the intended look.

An example of this can be seen in the game Sonic the Hedgehog, where parts of the scenery have waterfalls. The scenery graphics have no transparency, but by quickly changing the colors of the palette that makes up the waterfall, coupled with the natural effect of the analog signal to blur the graphics, it is possible to create an effect that simulates transparency. 

When viewing the same game on a modern LCD screen, the sharpness of the screen shows the individual pixels more clearly, losing some of the effects.

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These were some examples of solutions created by developers to deal with technical problems of the platforms from the 70s to the 90s. There are many others, but in general the technology of the time had a direct influence on the aesthetics and artistic freedom of a game. Today several games, especially those created by indie studios, embrace certain limitations for aesthetic or nostalgia reasons, while others work on top of the concept, but expanding it and creating something new, being a mixture of the old with the current.