I like to think of modern pixel art as its own aesthetic and art form. It's designed to be viewed on high DPI LED screens, and that's fine. I don't think it should be judged by how it looks on a CRT.

There's an undeniable charm to the older era of pixel art, and surely part of that is nostalgia, but I also think a lot of it comes from the fact that the economics and the hardware were a lot different. Up until the mid 1990s, the highest paid artists in the industry were working on pixel art games. The hardware was slow enough that there were real creative constraints, and we know that constraints often drive creativity.

CRTs are to video games what vinyl is to music and celluloid is to cinema. The flaws associated with the physical medium have become the defining aesthetic, such that a new medium which removes those flaws feels "sterile" and "hollow", like a concrete-slab brutalist building. There's also the sense of nostalgia. Rock music was less commercialized, or perceived as less commercialized, at the peak of the vinyl era (1960s-1970s). Computers and video games were more fun at the peak of the CRT era (1980s-1990s). So our brains kind of do this substitution wherein "warm fuzzy feelings we associate when X was popular" -> "X is better".

All I know is that when CDs hit the market I savored the additional detail they provided. A good, non-loudness-crushed recording had so many sumptuous highs I used to reach my fingers out and try to "feel" the consonants and vowels of the vocals. And when LCD monitors began to supplant CRTs my eyes were relieved at the additional sharpness. I remember these transition points, so I can say definitively that there was a time when we thought the newer stuff was indeed an improvement.

> I don't know if the CRT version is taken from an actual CRT, but I doubt it - I actually think it looks too fuzzy. I may be wrong - it could be an effect of a close-up photo scaled up - but it's more likely a CRT approximation generated by a software filter on a modern machine.

On both the NES and SNES, the pixels were so large that you could clearly see them even when using an RF adaptor. Each pixel was two scan lines, and wide enough that dithering was still very visible. The same goes for older games in the arcades up to (roughly) the early 1990s, (and I didn't spend much time in arcades after that.)

Not to say that artists didn't take advantage of CRT quirks, but you needed a really $h1tty TV, (much worse than the ones that I and my friends had) if they were going to fuzz away the edges.

> I also agree that modern, blocky pixel art often is a kind of misdirected, anachronistic nostalgia.

Pixel art, for me, is the Gameboy Color and Gameboy Advanced which I never played on a CRDT.

It's not that CRTs were "forgiving", it's that designers leaned into what they'd do to pixels. A classic example is the tanks in Atari 2600 Combat - they look ridiculous on a hi-res screen. On a CRT they sort of look like tanks.

I have a JAMMA cabinet at home. It has a CRT in it. I usually play on x-in-1 pirate emulator board. So I don't mind that not all the hardware is authentic. But it's important to me that the screen is authentic, or it all just feels wrong. The curve must be there, the scanlines must be there.

I really get quite cross when you visit a museum and they've got retro games playing on flatscreen LCDs. Doubly so when it's meant to be a vector game.