Video game visuals have come a long way since the ’90s. The jump between pixel art and polygons was a massive one, but players still had to rely on a bit of imagination to fully see the things game developers were trying to depict at the time. Now that we have graphics that could be mistaken for reality, we’ve also seen a wave of games intentionally recreating the look and feel of retro titles. And at least one veteran game developer doesn’t get why anyone would want to go back to all those jagged edges.
You might know Koji Sugimoto, a Square Enix programmer who has worked on games like Final Fantasy 10 and Xenogears. But unless you’ve been following him on social media for the last handful of years, you might have missed the legendary game developer discussing the trend of modern low-poly games. To put it mildly, he’s not a fan.
In 2019, Sugimoto expressed an intense dislike of recreating retro graphics while discussing a news article on the recent push to recapture the charm of old-school games.
“I spent a lot of futile effort and computation time to avoid it,” Sugimoto says. “The idea of finding it interesting to reproduce doesn’t occur to me.” Machine translation differs a bit in his adjective of choice when describing what he thinks of the intentional texture distortion that developers rely on to hark back to earlier video game generations. According to Google, he calls it “abhorrent,” whereas Grok translates him describing the trend as an “object of disdain.” Ultimately, Sugimoto appears to be expressing something deeply negative for nostalgia-driven graphics. And he hates it enough to return to the topic years later.
More recently, Sugimoto offered his two cents on a new feature for a game engine that makes it easier for developers to distort and warp textures. The technique would automate the process needed to approximate low-poly graphics, which will likely be useful to game creators working on modern throwbacks. But Sugimoto once again emphasized how bizarre it is for him to see anyone want to make games look bad.
“Back then, we went to great lengths to avoid distortions, but now they’re being called ‘flavor’ or something,” Sugimoto said. Sugimoto may be recalling the issues the original PlayStation had with depicting depth and perspective, and the struggle game developers faced when trying to work around those issues.
Sugimoto seems to mostly have negative associations with low-poly graphics, and it’s understandable why. When he was working on games, developers didn’t rely on blocky characters and simplistic worlds because they all loved the aesthetic. Rather, game developers had to work within tight constraints, and low-poly graphics were the best they could do with the technology they had. While all game developers must work within specific limitations dictated by hardware, there’s always a gap between what’s theoretically cool and interesting versus what is actually realistic and achievable. Undoubtedly, some game creators must’ve felt frustrated knowing that they couldn’t fully realize whatever they had imagined. If better graphics were possible, it’s likely that many of the franchises we know and love would have looked way different back in the ’90s.
It’s easy to understand why gaming fans love graphics that are arguably terrible compared to cutting-edge visuals. Anyone who grew up with low-poly worlds is bound to have a soft spot for them, because the era is tied with their conceptions of youth. Others recognize that realism is not inherently superior to other esthetics, and there’s beauty to be found in differing approaches to art. Plus, in the case of games that include filters that let you toggle back and forth between old visuals and new ones, it’s fun to see how many things have changed.
There’s one theory about art that might put it best, and it explains how people remember different eras of everything, from art to technology.
“Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature,” musical genius Brian Eno wrote in his diary collection, A Year with Swollen Appendices. “CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit — all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided. It’s the sound of failure: so much modern art is the sound of things going out of control, of a medium pushing to its limits and breaking apart. The distorted guitar sound is the sound of something too loud for the medium supposed to carry it. The blues singer with the cracked voice is the sound of an emotional cry too powerful for the throat that releases it. The excitement of grainy film, of bleached-out black and white, is the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them.”
Whenever this quote is recounted, it typically doesn’t include the full diary entry Eno wrote. But what’s left out might best capture what’s at play with modern low-poly graphics. You can feel awe and wonder at how closely realistic graphics can approximate its inspiration, but there’s little interpretation happening on the viewer’s side. You don’t get a sense of how someone else looks at the world, what details stand out and what aspects fade into the background. When you’re dealing with graphical realism, the opportunities to stoke the imagination are scarce.
“Note to the artist: when the medium fails conspicuously, and especially if it fails in new ways, the listener believes something is happening beyond its limits,” Eno says.
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