[dietrichepp]

Ron Gilbert directly addresses the use of pixel art in a blog post.

Pixel art is what they used due the time and circumstances of the original games, not because they like pixel art better than other media.

https://grumpygamer.com/when_i_made_another_monkeyisland

> Monkey Island 1 and 2 weren't pixel art games. They were games using state-of-the-art tech and art.

> When Dave and I first started brainstorming Return to Monkey Island we talked about pixel art, but it didn't feel right. We didn't want to make a retro game. You can't read an article about Thimbleweed Park without it being called a "throwback game". I didn't want Return to Monkey Island to be just a throwback game, I wanted to keep moving Monkey Island forward because it's interesting, fun, and exciting. It's what the Monkey Island games have always done.

There's also a talk by (I think) Mark Ferrari, where he talks about how they hired artists for these classic pixel art games. Artists were hired on the strength of their art skills, and they had to adapt to the pixel medium in order to make those classic games. Easier to hire an artist and train them to make pixel art, rather than hire a pixel pusher and teach them to make art.

[grumbel]

On top of that, Monkey Island 2 was never a real pixel-art game to begin with, all the backgrounds were hand painted[1] and scanned. Only the character sprites and objects were still pixel-art.

[1] https://mixnmojo.com/media/galleries/Monkey-Island-2-LeChuck...

[dialogbox]

wow. That's really cool collection. Thank you for sharing.

[oneeyedpigeon]

I totally get his point and, of course, it's entirely up to him to do whatever he wants with it. However, I think the point about pixel art making a game a "throwback" is a little unfair. I, for one, would love to see a modern pixel art Monkey Island game with a much higher res and a wider palette of colours than was available at the time. I don't think that would make it a "throwback"; pixel art is simply a different style, not just a graphical limitation.

[dietrichepp]

> However, I think the point about pixel art making a game a "throwback" is a little unfair.

I agree, but that’s also not what Gilbert is saying. The problem is not whether it “is” a throwback, but whether it is perceived as a throwback by the general public. That kind of perception drives conversations about Thimbleweed Park and shapes people’s perceptions about it.

Pixel art is, unfortunately, perceived to be low effort. All I really mean by this is that there’s a discrepancy between how hard people think pixel art is to make, and how hard it actually is to make. This makes it more challenging to actually sell games that have pixel art.