8-bit narratives

We’ve come a long way in video games from the early days of 8-bit, frame-sequenced, sprite-based characters to today’s world of gloriously rendered 3D character models that come fully lip-synced and animate every strand of facial hair.

People simply expect games and CGI to get more and more photorealistic with time. But those in the industry know about the law of diminishing returns with polygon models all too well. Adding 100 more polygons to a character model in 1995 may have resulted in a vastly superior model, but today, adding even 1000 more doesn’t make much of a discernible difference.

Enter the 8-bit narrative. There’s a whole slew of indie games on the rise which are scrapping the whole notion of high-resolution graphics entirely in favor of creating their own art style. This mostly ends up being some cutesy arcade-style theme with vivid colors, supported by a funky soundtrack and a very compelling gameplay experience.

Take Undertale, for example. It has been crushing it on the Steam store, beating out triple-A titles such as Call of Duty: Black Ops III and for a while, even Fallout 4. Look at a couple trailers to make your judgement. How in the world can a game made by one person sell so much more than games that massive corporations with hundreds of developers pushing code every day?

There are many answers, but it comes down to the core experience. Games like Undertale don’t try too hard to be a “videogame” by industry definition. It’s a game where you explore an underground world filled with monsters, which means player interactivity was necessary. This would not pass as a book or a movie. The creator knew he wanted to tell a story and a video game was the best medium to do that in.

The sprite animations in Undertale are so well done that it manages to make a stronger emotional connection with the player than a fully-rendered 3D model ever could. The little details of how a monster’s eyebrows curve or how their lip moves just one pixel to the left or right provide the player with just enough visual cues that their mind is able to fill the gap with their own imagination.

As we all may have heard, imagination is always better than the real thing. Your mind knows what it likes, and it will fill in the gaps with what it likes. Some games even allow you to achieve this potential, such as Minecraft. That too has been killing it for the past few years on the sales charts. Is it because of its incredible graphics? Nope. It allows full player freedom to do whatever they want. Whatever you can imagine, you can build. And for this reason, no-one cares that it looks like a 70’s arcade game.

It really pumps me up to see industry behemoths being taken down by small indie teams that know what players want. The makers of games like these are people who want to play games like these. They know that a large software company is not going to build it, so they might as well. I’m excited to see a future of immersive experiences where the focus is not on the graphics, but on the emotional connections that the experience makes with the viewer. It makes for a significantly more memorable experience.