Pixel Art and the Myth of The CRT Effect

The ‘CRT Effect’ myth says that the reason why pixel art of old games looked so much better is due to the smoothing and blending effects of cathode-ray tube (CRT) displays, which were everywhere until the early 2000s. In fits of mistaken nostalgia this has led both to modern-day extreme cubism pixel art and video game ‘CRT’ filters that respectively fail to approach what pixel art was about, or why old games looked the way they did back with our NES and SNES game consoles. This is a point which [Carl Svensson] vehemently argues from a position of experience, and one which is likely shared by quite a few of our readers.

Although there is some possible color bleed and other artefacts with CRTs due to the shadow mask (or Sony’s Trinitron aperture grille), there was no extreme separation between pixels or massive bleed-over into nearby pixels to create some built-in anti-aliasing as is often claimed unless you were using a very old/cheap or dying CRT TV. Where such effects did happen was mostly in the signal being fed into the CRT, which ranged from the horrid (RF, composite) to the not-so-terrible (S-Video, component) to the sublime (SCART RGB), with RGB video (SCART or VGA) especially busting the CRT effect myth.

Where the pixel art of yester-year shines is in its careful use of dithering and anti-aliasing to work around limited color palettes and other hardware limitations. Although back in the Atari 2600 days this led to the extreme cubism which we’re seeing again in modern ‘retro pixel art’ games, yesterday’s artists worked with the hardware limitations to create stunning works of arts, which looked great on high-end CRTs connected via RGB and decent via composite on the kids’ second-hand 14″ color set with misaligned electron guns.