Trying to explain the state of the art in videogames is like trying to explain the state of the art in literature. Yes, now we have better printers, but that does not matter that much, and yes, now we talk about different topics, but that does not mean that the books written more than two thousand years ago are still some of the most influential. That’s why when we talk about videogames we have to separate the technology and the art and we have to understand the evolution to understand the new releases. Having this in mind and stablishing a relation between this explanation and my decision making now I will expose which is the state of the art in videogames.

The begining

The idea of creating a game inside a computer was not born thinking in having fun, or at least not in having fun playing it. At the begining of the 50s, after the second world war, when the computers still lived in labs, some scientist decided to implement some tabletop games inside computers, as an exercise to show the capabilities of them. Probably they were also trying to have fun, but by developing the games. Examples of this games are Nim or Oxo. It was not until the 1958 when Tennis for two was developed and showed people that scientists can also be fun and creative. The novelty with this game is that it was not trying to replicate a tabletop game but it was thought from scratch to be a computer game. It was the first real videogame. Four years latter, in 1962, Spacewar! was developed and people understood how fun it could be. When I say people I am refering to the scientist in the labs, we still had to wait another 10 years since the computers became cheap enough to be mass produced. First it were the arcade machines, being Atari one of the most important companies, and after that the videogame consoles, with Nintendo and Sega leading the market. At the same time the personal computers were starting to be a real thing, being the ZX Spectrum, comodore 64, MSX or the Amstrad CPC really popular at the begining of the 80s. The capabilities of this game consoles and computers were really limited, but the fact that were so afordable created a market and the videogame industry started to awake.

Graphics

If you are a game artist and you want to make a real retro game do not use pixel art with a nice colour palette, you should use monochrome vector graphics.