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▲ charcircuit 9 hours ago

>Drawn painstakingly one pixel at a time

There was paint software. You didn't have to draw a pixel at a time.

▲mrandish 8 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> You didn't have to draw a pixel at a time.

Back in the day I was fortunate to work with some of the best pixel artists in the industry like Jim Sachs (https://spillhistorie.no/2024/09/13/legends-of-the-games-ind...) and they definitely did draw the vast majority of their pixels one at a time in the best paint programs available like Electronic Arts Deluxe Paint. In the linked article Sach's is quoted "I put dots on the screen. One at a time at first. Green dots for grass, blue dots for sky, gray dots for castle blocks. Hour after hour. I was happy if I got one square inch of the screen done in a day."

To create top notch pixel art in those limited resolutions and palettes forces the artist into creating the illusion of colors and detail which aren't actually there in any one pixel. They do this by modifying the colors of individual adjacent pixels to imply shading and highlights. Jim would modify one pixel, zoom out to assess the overall effect on that area of the image, then zoom back in and modify the next pixel. I encourage you to zoom in and pixel peep some of Jim's images. Most of those pixel patterns aren't uniform enough to be from an 80s paint program and not randomly Bayer-ish enough to be a digitized image.

Jim has discussed his workflow in detail in interviews. The value of Deluxe Paint to an artist like Jim wasn't laying down swathes of pixels, it was mostly fast zooming and panning as well as detailed palette control. Of course, those artists would use whatever capabilities their tools enabled when they could but it wasn't nearly as much or as often as you're assuming.

▲JKCalhoun 8 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I think that's right. Paint programs might give you the "broad strokes" (so to speak), fill areas — it's clear the dithering on an arm, for example, was done a pixel at a time.

I spent many hours in "fat bits" mode in MacPaint creating B&W game artwork for early shareware games I wrote. Click a pixel to invert it.

▲msephton 5 hours ago | parent [-]

Not in Japan, you can see how the dithering was done in the video I link below, which was taken from promo footage of one of the most famous period Japanese paint apps for PC-98: Multi Paint System (1992, by Woody_RINN). The artist would paint two colours and then use a dither blend tool along the contrasting edge. https://youtu.be/nIdFor2WOnw?t=430

I'm sure some people did it pixel-by-pixel, but not so much in Japan where the software was designed to make dithering like this very easy.

You can find my big list of Japanese pixel art apps at: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41136905

▲qingcharles 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

100%. I worked with artists in the 2D era. They were doing sprites a pixel at a time.

▲charcircuit 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

>I encourage you to zoom in and pixel peep some of Jim's images

Even without zooming in you can tell that those images look nothing like what was being made on the pc98. The article was talking about the 80s which was a decade before what we are talking about with the pc98. It is not valid to assume that they were done the same.

▲mrandish 2 hours ago | parent [-]

> The article was talking about the 80s

I cited that article as only one example. It focused on one artist who created graphics mainly for one platform, the Amiga, which was sold from 1985 to 1994. However, graphics were made as I described as early as 1978 by many artists on many different platforms including the Apple II (MicroPainter was popular), Atari 400/800, TI 99/4a, Radio Shack Color Computer and others. They often did detail work a pixel at a time for the reasons I described. This wasn't unique to Sachs or the Amiga.

Regarding timing: The PC-98 platform was released in 1982 and was primarily an 80s phenomenon which had peaked sometime around 1990. While it continued to be sold throughout the 1990s, it's primary growth and dominance were established in the 1980s. Please see the Wikipedia entry for PC-98 which says: "In 1990, IBM Japan introduced the DOS/V operating system which enabled displaying Japanese text on standard IBM PC/AT VGA adapters." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PC-98). That greatly expanded and accelerated the competition against PC-98.

▲charcircuit an hour ago | parent [-]

Doing detail work pixel by pixel is a much different claim than drawing the line art pixel by pixel or doing the flat shading pixel by pixel.

>Regarding timing: The PC-98 platform was released in 1982 and was primarily an 80s phenomenon which had peaked sometime around 1990.

Look at the popular PC98 games and you will see that they were made in the 1990s. Alicesoft didn't even release their first game until 1989.

▲spankibalt 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> You didn't have to draw a pixel at a time.

I always have to laugh when that one comes up. But yeah, many Japanese dot/pixel art graphics packages (e. g. Multi Paint System) have brushes for those characteristic dithering patterns. Fast work! And I don't think they did pixel-blending (as on Western home computers) either; the art was done on machines with computer monitors for customers with pretty much the same systems (e. g. PC-98). Manual corrections, analog/digital "transkriptions" (from raster paper for example), etc. are another story...