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by vanderZwan 1502 days ago
Which is kinda strange because the "pixel" art of those days was never intended to be rendered as blocky pixels, but designed to make use of the CRT's softness.
3 comments

Arguably true for the EGA versions (when played on real EGA hardware), but the VGA versions used a 320x200 resolution, which was line-doubled to 320x400, and displayed on monitors sharp enough to be usable at 640x480. The pixels were obviously blocky.
I mean, it was still clearly low-res. CRTs and smaller screen sized helped, but you could still see the pixels.
Indeed, you could see the pixels, but that was all it was. Advanced games used antialiasing to lessen the blocky effect. You only could dream of a future where graphics are "paper like" without pixels. At that moment, it didn't fill like low-res, at all. 320x200 256 colors was the bleeding edge of computer graphics. Later on, some games started appearing with 640x480.
That's also why I can't stand some of the modern pixel-games. They are too blocky and doesn't work well on modern screens. Using blocky graphics is not "retro" at all. It's more an artistic impression of how they think old games looked like.
The pixels were very obvious at 320x200 on most late 80s CRTs with RGB input! (Standard for PC, very common on Amiga and ST.)