I personally find "block-based" rendering of 8-bit era pixel art quite ugly. There's way too much high-frequency content – too many edges – making it very visually busy.
As others have said, 8-bit art was made in a context where the "pixels" were viewed through an analogue filter, that being an NTSC display. My understanding is that to a first approximation, such a display (i.e. the electron gun + shadow/aperture mask) acts as a spatial lowpass filter with a resolution of 640x480 pixels, with maybe a 1-pixel-wide horizontal "smearing" effect due to the horizontal movement of the gun. Of course various console + display combinations deviate wildly from this ideal, but the lowpass filtering is the basis for understanding how 8-bit art was expected to be viewed.
There is no question about the heritage of 8bit-style art, and whether you find modern renditions ugly or not is not really a concern here. But I would like to point out as someone who grew up in the eighties, people referred to those little atomic picture cells rendered on the display as "pixels", not as "my monitor's representation of a pixel".
It's also worth mentioning that for most of us today, graphics tastes have changed quite a lot, so emulating the original blur and smear of an NTSC display is perceived as far less of a generally acceptable aesthetic solution than rendering rectangular blocks is. Of course, opinions differ, but you can totally vote with your wallet on that.
You're talking about how art is designed with an expectation about the manner in which it is later consumed. To the degree this is even a realistic expectation, you would have to make the same concession to today's pixel artists who are creating works loosely based on an 8bit heritage, but which are often clearly and intentionally distanced from that heritage. You might personally object to viewing original games from the 8bit era on modern systems at all on the grounds of authenticity and distortion of artistic intent, but that's not an objection you can raise against modern pixel artists and their working premises.
Overall, I object to this notion that, say, the average 80s CRT pixel representation is somehow the canonical rendering of the ur-pixel and that we should strive to somehow emulate that. I think we should instead do whatever works for the modern context. You might counter that blocks don't meet this goal for your tastes, or that we should stop using recognizably blocky pixels altogether, but again that's a personal preference.
The actual argument above was not about personal preference at all, it was about what can rightfully be referred to as a pixel and what can't (and I do maintain that in this context linguistic pedantry does not yield any meaningful benefits).
> people referred to those little atomic picture cells rendered on the display as "_pixels_"
'These aren't the pixels you're looking for'. As the article points out, the pixels on a CRT do not have a 1-to-1 correspondence with the pixels in RAM. If you understand a pixel as a sample, then the mental picture becomes clearer:
RAM pixels -> video card DAC converts to continuous signal -> CRT resamples again into monitor pixels -> your eye/brain reconverts into a continuous image
I answered that in my comment above, but it was an edit so you probably didn't see it in time.
Expanding on that answer, I think you're making a case for DRM here. Mario wasn't supposed to be not-blurry so we shouldn't be allowed to see him like that. If that's your opinion, I disagree, but fair enough. It's an entirely different thing though to assert that modern artists should not be making new pixel/block art, because it seems to me that their intent has value, too.
So the question becomes whether you object to that art style, or just the commonly used name for that style. Personally, I think you're going to have a hard time with either one, especially given the fact that the common usage of the word "pixel" has always been blurry, and that you could simply avoid modern "pixel" games at no personal cost and still allow other people to make and enjoy them.
To me, that doesn't seem so much in support for DRM, so much as support for something like the negation of "death of the author".
I think there is room to say both "this was the authorial/creatorial intent behind Mario's sprite, which should be acknowledged as being distinguished by being the intent" and to say "I aesthetically appreciate this deviation from the creator's intent, more so than the original intent."
The deviation in interpretation from the original intent is, I think, a new (derivative) creation, in a sense. (Though it may be an accident, and might not have an intent to create behind it.)
But we should appreciate modern pixel artwork as a cool retro-themed anachronism, not an actual representation of what displays rendered in the past. The idea that a pixel is only a 2D square gets in the way of that -- ideally, people could understand that it refers to both a point sample as well as a box-filtered rendering of that sample, and those two senses imply different ways to view a set of pixels.
As someone pointed out below, pixel art has been made for LCD displays for a long time, starting from all the handheld gaming consoles, and also including all the pixel art made in the last 15 or so years ever since LCD displays became predominant, also CRT computer monitors have much sharper pixels than TVs. At this point there has probably been more pixel art made on and for displays with sharp pixels than for crappy TVs. It's time to let go.
Where did I mention modern pixel art? My point is that modern renderings of 8-bit-era (i.e. 1980s) art is anachronistic and violates the artists' intent. That art was mastered for consumption through NTSC and looks ugly if you try to reinterpret it through the modern pop idea of "pixel art". It's like taking "Gone With the Wind" and watching it with frame-rate interpolation on a handheld device. It'll look like crap because you're changing the medium.
I don't care what modern artists do. You say "let go" like I'm taking a stance on nouveau pixel art; I'm not.
You're right about Europe, but I believe Japan used NTSC. Wikipedia agrees:
"NTSC...is the analog television system that was used in most of the Americas (except Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay, Uruguay, and French Guiana); Burma; South Korea; Taiwan; Japan; the Philippines; and some Pacific island nations and territories"
Yep, Game Boy was a different medium. And Nintendo's artists didn't just take the Mario graphics assets from the NES and plop them on a Game Boy; that would have looked like shit for a number of reasons. Yet that is what people do when they take the 8-bit-era Mario sprite and render it with giant squares.
Graphics assets are no more a picture than a recording of an artist's brush strokes are. They can only be interpreted in the context of a medium, be it CRT scanlines vs. LCD squares or oil-on-canvas vs. ink-on-papyrus.
As others have said, 8-bit art was made in a context where the "pixels" were viewed through an analogue filter, that being an NTSC display. My understanding is that to a first approximation, such a display (i.e. the electron gun + shadow/aperture mask) acts as a spatial lowpass filter with a resolution of 640x480 pixels, with maybe a 1-pixel-wide horizontal "smearing" effect due to the horizontal movement of the gun. Of course various console + display combinations deviate wildly from this ideal, but the lowpass filtering is the basis for understanding how 8-bit art was expected to be viewed.