The 16-Bit Hall

The glass

The word 16-bit refers to the width of the processor’s main data paths, and mostly it is a marketing label. What mattered to artists was the video chip. Where the previous generation allowed a few colours per tile, the new console and computer chips allowed palettes of several hundred or several thousand shades, with sixteen or more on screen for each sprite and tile. Backgrounds could have two or three independent layers that scrolled at different speeds. For the first time a game screen could look like a painting.

Parallax, or how to draw depth with no depth

Look out of a moving train window. The fence post by the track shoots past, the hedge behind it is slower, the hills far away barely seem to move. If a game scrolls its layers at different speeds, the eye reads depth without any geometry at all. Parallax scrolling was the signature trick of this period, and it was cheap: it needed only more than one background layer and the willingness to move each by a different amount. A sky layer crawling at a tenth of the speed of the foreground could be the most expensive-looking thing in a game.

Dithering and the art of fewer colours

Even with generous palettes, artists still ran out of shades. The trick was dithering: placing two colours in a pattern, a checkerboard or a pair of interleaved diagonals, so that at normal viewing distance the eye blends them into a third. A sunset gradient built from two colours and a checker looked, from across the room, like a smooth fade. On the cathode-ray televisions of the day, whose soft edges blurred the pattern further, it looked even better. On a sharp modern screen the pattern is plain, which is why dithering is now a style and not just a technique. The palette toy lets you switch it on and off.

Fake 3D, then real 3D

Console chips of the time included hardware to rotate and scale a single big background layer. Turn the layer onto its back, squash the far end, and a flat map becomes a road or a plain stretching to a horizon. Programmers called these effects names that sounded like technical manuals, and players called them magic. Racing games used the trick to make a road. Flying games used it for the ground.

Meanwhile, towards the middle of the decade, the first generation of polygon hardware arrived: textured triangles, drawn by a dedicated chip into a frame buffer. They looked angular and wobbly, and the textures swam as the camera moved, because early hardware did not correct for perspective. But they opened a door that has never closed. A scene could now be built from a model, not painted by hand, and the camera could go anywhere.

The display

Computers had moved to sharper monitors with finer dot pitch and a sharper picture, while consoles stayed with television. Artists making art for both had to think twice. A sprite drawn for a soft television looked crude on a monitor, and a monitor drawing looked blurry on a TV. The best studios made two versions, or made one and tested it on both.

The input

The directional pad gave way to a more elaborate controller: a pad for the left thumb, four face buttons in a diamond for the right, and shoulder buttons that a forefinger could reach. The shoulder buttons were the real invention. They gave the player two more verbs without taking a thumb off the main controls. A sprint on one, a block on the other, and the hands barely moved.

Fighting games on arcade cabinets demanded still more: six buttons in two rows, which let a game map light, medium and heavy to punch and kick. Special moves were entered as short sequences of joystick motions, a quarter-circle forward and a button, and the vocabulary of motion became its own language. Reading a combo off a screen was a skill. Executing it under pressure was another.

The mouse was the center of home computer games, and a new class of game grew round it: point-and-click adventures, strategy games, simulations. A mouse gives you a cursor, not a body, so these games were about deciding, not reacting. Many players found a quiet pleasure in them that the arcade could not offer.

Analog arrives

Towards the end of the period, controllers with a small stick that could be tilted in any direction and read as a number, not a switch, appeared. Movement became continuous. A character could walk slowly or run, turn gently or sharply, and the player’s thumb became a dial. The change is hard to overstate, and it produced the next generation of games almost by itself.

The room

The centre of play moved to the living room. A console sat under the television with a pad on a long cord, and play was something you did on the carpet with friends, with the second controller in a pile of cables. Games were bought in shops that smelled of cardboard and plastic, rented for the weekend, and swapped at school. The magazine was still the main source of news, with a monthly column of screenshots, tips and review scores the whole room argued about.

Arcades were still there, but they had changed. The best rooms specialised in things the home could not do: giant cabinets with seats and force-feedback wheels, fighting games with a crowd standing behind, dance and rhythm cabinets that turned the player into a performer. The fighting cabinet created a social structure of its own, with the next challenger putting a coin on the edge of the panel and waiting for the current winner to lose.

On computers, a growing number of people played at a desk, in a bedroom or at a kitchen table. Shareware changed distribution: a developer could give away the first episode of a game and sell the rest, and a disk full of shareware passed hand to hand was a free arcade. Bulletin boards, reached by modem, offered file libraries and message boards that felt like clubs with a phone number. The seeds of the next hall were planted in these basements.

Handheld machines proved that a game could live in a pocket. Small grey-green screens, a pair of batteries and a cartridge slot made the bus ride and the waiting room into places to play. The screen was small and unlit, and the games that worked were the ones that took the limitation as the premise.

Three design ideas we borrowed

1. Let the sky do the work

   The dusk-banded canyon in Gloaming Drift is a pure 16-bit move: a gradient built from a handful of bands, dithered at their edges, doing the job of a hundred hand-painted clouds. Add a layer of hills that scrolls slower than the road and a still image becomes a place. The lesson is that background art is atmosphere, and atmosphere is cheap if you choose it carefully.

   Gloaming Drift, 1993 Play Gloaming Drift

2. Physics as a personality

   This is the decade in which platform games learned that a jump arc could be the whole character. Pogo Pilgrim stores landing energy in a spring and gives different ground different rules: mud, ice, bounce pads, spikes. You do not need more buttons when the floor has opinions. A single press and a held release are plenty if the world answers back.

   Pogo Pilgrim, 1993 Play Pogo Pilgrim

3. Spend the palette on one thing

   Gearheart, a clockwork courier crossing a sunset city of cogs and still in the workshop, is a study in giving a game one colour to be proud of. The rule of a 16-bit palette is to pick the thing the eye should find, and let the rest sit politely in the dark. A single warm glow in a field of cool greys does more than ten bright hues.

   Gearheart, 1992 In the workshop

Games from this era on Eracade

• Gloaming Drift 1993 · Racing / Time Attack Play
• Pogo Pilgrim 1993 · Platform / Physics Play
• Gearheart 1992 · Platformer In the workshop
• Tidepool Tactics 1994 · Puzzle / Strategy In the workshop
• Dusk Highway 1996 · Racing In the workshop

Browse every 16-Bit game.

What ended the era

The era did not so much end as step aside. Polygon graphics proved more flexible than sprites, and once a console could draw a respectable three-dimensional world, the incentive to hand-paint every frame faded. Disc-based media made room for full-motion video and recorded music, and the cartridge’s small, fast, careful budget gave way to something looser. A bigger budget did not always make a better game, and a generation of sprite artists and tile designers moved on with a justified sense of loss.

The look came back later as a conscious choice, with sharper edges and more deliberate palettes than anyone had in the original. If you want to understand why it keeps returning, look at a good dithered sunset. It was never trying to be realistic. It was trying to be beautiful with the paint it had, and that is a harder and more interesting job.

Further reading

Outside links are chosen for being stable, general and free to read. We link; we do not copy.

• Parallax scrolling (Wikipedia) Layered backgrounds and how the illusion of depth works.
• Dither (Wikipedia) Dithering in images and audio, with pictures.
• Ordered dithering (Wikipedia) The threshold-matrix method used in the palette toy.
• Shareware (Wikipedia) Try-before-you-buy distribution and how it spread games.