[nsxwolf]

I think one of the things he said is telling and gives useful perspective - they wanted to do more with the visuals, but were stuck with what was possible in 1990. We shouldn't elevate retro pixel art to some perfect art form. It's unlikely to be what the original artists intended, rather it was what they had to accept.

[gavanwoolery]

I agree. :) Pixel art is not inherently perfect, and there is A LOT of bad pixel art (especially in many mobile games now days). However, there is something about pixel art that I think makes it great: it is timeless, and if created correctly, incapable of many of the flaws other art types are subject to. Polygons are very hard to work with, especially in an FPS, because players can get very close and observe every detail, and the model quickly degrades when it is close to your face - not to mention the texturing, which more often than not is completely flat, sans parallax mapping or displacement mapping. Vector art is much harder than people might give it credit for, and making "good" looking vector art is very, very challenging -- the most common problem I see is messy curves because people did not take the time to tweak the handles on their beziers. More often than not, vector art comes out looking like the kind you find in cheap Flash / mobile games. Raster art (i.e. Photoshop without limitations), often results in art that is in many ways blurry - various blurs and super-sampling tend to get over-used, and the result is very soft looking artwork (take Hearthstone as an example):

http://us.battle.net/hearthstone/static/images/media/screens...

It certainly does not look bad, but many icons here lack the same crispness you would find in pixel art.

Assuming you follow all the correct guidelines (1 pixel wide outlines, no pillow shading, good dithering, small palette, cold -> warm shading, clean lines and fills, etc), pixel art can approach perfection -- because of its inherent limitations. A single vector curve can have an infinite variety of permutations, but there are only so many ways you can draw a line of pixels (the same goes for a NURBs surface or set of polygons). It is exactly this limitation that enables artists -- if you are given an infinite canvas with every color of paint in the known universe, you can kill yourself trying to perfect one piece.

[kybernetikos]

What the original artists intended may well not have been as good as what they ended up creating.

As soon as you hear George Lucas say the words 'what I originally intended' you should run a mile.

[chc]

That's because George Lucas is very seldom telling the truth about his intent. If you look at the things George Lucas said and wrote back then and compare them to what he says and writes now, it seems pretty clear that Lucas doesn't readily distinguish between his present ideas and his previous plans. I don't know whether he actually doesn't remember that he used to think differently or if he's consciously trying to reshape history — but at any rate, the George Lucas of today can't be relied upon for insight into the mind of the George Lucas of yesterday.