I see a few people saying they couldn’t get used to CGA, that it was absurd, or worse than no graphics at all.
I can relate to that. But as I’ve aged I’ve appreciated just how much was done with less back. I mean that literally: we couldn’t afford a computer so my dad would haul home his work computer each weekend. We’d call BBS’ on it, print stuff. Play shareware games. It pissed my mom off because it took up half the dinner table. But my brother learned to code this way too.
So later on when my friends got EGA and VGA, CGA meant “poor.”
Fast forward many years and I have kids and were in better financial circumstances than my dad and mom back then. My kids have MacBooks. One of their friends was over one night and was visibly embarrassed that all she had was the school assigned Chromebook. She and my daughter were doing homework and her friend said that she wished her family could afford better laptops.
I didn’t want to embarrass her but then next morning after I made pancakes and I was sitting at the table I was like hey let’s take a look at these Chromebooks (we had an old one sitting around) and the three of us sat there and in about an hour and a half they’d put together a very simple farm game in the spirit of Stardew Valley on PICO-8.
Point being, we live in a world where especially with AI, it’s easy to think we can do everything. And it can feel like that, which means that when you can’t, you feel worse that you can’t because it would appear everyone else is doing amazing things with no limits.
But maybe we need more limits on things. Maybe that 4 color palette forced devs and artists to be creative back then in ways that make things better for everyone.
I have often wondered if the corollary to this is that without constraints design becomes unnecessary. I used to play Fortnite and PUBG a bit and the UI there clearly suffers from excess of available computing power.
It's a well-known effect in the study of creativity. And it's not just the presence of significant physical or engineering constraints, even the presence of minor arbitrary constraints can spark creativity in unrelated aspects of the work.
For example, 'Weekend Film' competitions have long introduced minor arbitrary constraints only announced at the start to prevent pre-work, such as "Blue socks must be seen and at least one character must have an accent". Often, the socks would be only be seen in the background for a few frames and the accented character would be a passerby overheard for 2 seconds, yet filmmakers, judges and audiences found the presence of the constraints caused all the projects to be more creatively diverse in completely unrelated ways.
Interestingly, the effect doesn't have one name. Artists and designers have terms for it, cognitive psychologists have another term, behavioral/organizational sciences and engineering/innovation research each have their own literature as well.
> ....as I’ve aged I’ve appreciated just how much was done with less back [then].
As a kid and teen CGA and EGA looked absurd to me, even when that was the best one could get at home. So I waited until VGA to get into PC gaming. Now in middle age and having tried my hand at VGA+ art, it is delightful to see well rendered at at every color depth.
The 'could not get used to CGA' requires context. Back then I had a PC with Hercules and CGA (with a hardware switch at the back of the computer), so that was the maximum and I did not know better for a few years. When I moved to VGA then of course I preferred it over CGA, but for several years I did not 'get used with CGA', I only knew CGA. Yeah, today I would not go for a CGA graphics in a game ... so what? That's irrelevant.
It was CGA specifically that was terrible, though. I'd take 4-shade grey Gameboy graphics over that color palette. There's nothing wrong with 4 colors per se, but there's a lot wrong with those four colors.
A couple more registers to have some kind of selection of the colors would have gone a long way.
Does anyone else remember the (at the time) searing brightness of CGA and EGA monitors? It’s something I always noticed when compared to my Amiga monitor and to VGA that followed. I kinda miss it :)
Every time I see CGA graphics in cyan, magenta, black and white it reminds me of my youth and how 'cold' it felt at the time to see those graphics, I could never really get used to it. When EGA/VGA graphics came along it felt so warm and in my experience games really started to come to life.
Respect for the graphics artists in general for that time to be able to make something out of almost nothing, four colors or less and/or black and white low resolution.
The CGA palettes were designed with three main objectives: good contrast on composite and black and white displays, high contrast productivity UX, and simple ttl circuitry. There was a limit of 16 colours, but if you wanted to step up resolution you had to compromise by selecting fewer colors. A major compromise choice was resolution vs colours. High resolution cost you your magenta and yellow. Have a google for the mode 4 and mode 5 pallets and mathematically why they are the way they are, it’s super interesting if you’re in to retro tech.
In the later era, as EGA and VGA gained, I think CGA became a bolt on by some game devs, to accommodate that dwindling audience, so the problem was compounded by it being very second class citizen.
Ditto. My first ibm compatible was CGA, and those pallets represent a really specific era in my memories. I actually jumped from CGA to VGA (DOS to Win3.1 as well!) and it was like somebody had switched on all the lights in a precisely dark room.
Hearing the Monkey Island theme played how it would have been on a high end sound card is crazy. PC speakers did their best but it was composed as a damn symphony.
Having grown up gaming on PC speaker I only knew the wavetable MIDI miracles from hearsay. Now any time I touch some DOSbox retro memory I'm nothing but disappointed becausr those MIDI tunes? They are just that, tinny voyages through the general MIDI instrument set where well made PC speaker programming can have awesome roughness.
Many MIDI things sound better on old hardware than they do via modern reproduction. FM chips were very different from wavetable, and there's quite a lot of variation besides. It's no wonder some music sounds goofy, now --it was written with a very different palette of sounds.
I came to comment on the same... I grew up with CGA graphics for my first games, too. It was, in many ways, worse than no color at all. But the jarring visuals and the feeling of it will always stay with me.
I don't know why this site calls CGA "16 color" (the size of the CGA palette, of which 4 could be used at a time at this game's resolution), while also calling EGA "16 color" (when EGA uses 16 colors at a time from a palette of 64).
I fed this question to Gemini (compare CGA vs EGA) and it made the same category error in its distinction, calling both "16 color". So, to the human that didn't check their slop site, maybe you should fix that.
There were two PC floppy versions - 16 colour and 256 colour. The 16 colour version had fallbacks for CGA and Hercules, the 256 colour version had a fallback for EGA. So the CGA screenshot is the 16 colour version running with CGA fallback, and this is also why there's a set of "256 colour EGA" shots. It's a little confusing, but it's correct.
A friend has a composite extra monitor for the CGA output and I was amazed to discover that it used composite to generate more color for supporting games.
On composite, the game can display more colors. I never knew at the time and was only aware of that a decade ago. ScummVM and DOSBox but knows how to render composite.
This while fully understandable, has one have to go back even further to what it felt like to actually be able to display any graphics at all and what that felt like ...
Lucky you that at least you had a CGA monitor. The were very expensive in my country. I used a Hercules monitor with SIMCGA; it was probably one of the first DOS programs I learned to run.
Monkey Island II was one of the reasons I got into computers as a kid originally (an industry where I of course work today).
The latest Monkey Island was a disappointment - not the artwork, the Disney nature of it. It was bubbly zany, had a child and a dad as narrators and had music and other aspects of a children's movie. Maybe I didn't age enough and didn't reproduce enough to fit the creator's demographic, but I miss the self deprecating and slightly mysterious aura of the early games.
VGA was beautiful back then, EGA was definitely tolerable. Now they are making EGA games on Steam for die-hard adventure gamers.
You don't need photorealism to make a good game.
Hell, people used to listen to football games (in the UK sense too) and baseball games on the radio. Imagination is a powerful thing. It's the content that matters.
When I see monkey island I always think of the Amiga copy protection on monkey island 2. The game was on something like 13 floppies that you had to keep switching but there was only super hard copy protection on disk 7 or something so you'd get part way through the game before getting scuppered. (I was only about 10 years old).
The Lucasfilm Games artists did amazing work with limited color palettes. You can make the argument that the 16-color versions of Secret of Monkey Island and LOOM actually look better than the 256-color versions.
Oh, the nostalgia! I like the Borland Turbo Vision UI look of the site, which most DOS apps used at the time.
The first time I played Monkey Island on an Hercules monitor, it made me fall in love with graphic adventures. Years later, I played the VGA CD version. At that time, I bought the Monkey Island CD, Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, and Day of the Tentacle. They were the peak of LucasGames.
Sometimes I really wish i could back to this time of my life. Those adventure games had a certain magic that hasn't been reproduced so far. There are some good throw back games on steam, but somehow its different. Is it because I am older now? Would be interesting to be able to experience them from scratch with the mind of my present being.
Anyway, just on to of my mind:
- Indiana Jones , especially the one with the Paris
underground and the Nazi fortress. Forgot the name.
- Monkey Islands
- Phantasmagoria 2
- Baphomets Curse 1 and 2 , especially 1.
- Kings Quest 7 (god, the drawings. Like a Disney movie)
- Simon the Sorcerer
All bangers!!!!!
So many crazy memories. They all had really good stories, a nice humour, tough puzzles and really good drawing.
Idk, I really can succumb to nostalgia here :-)
It's different in the core mechanic, but if you haven't played Return of the Obra Dinn, it's one of the most rewarding, well-crafted games I've experienced in the past decade, and scratched a similar itch of the old Sierra games, though again, not a pure text or point and click adventure... more a 3D, 1-bit murder mystery done as a detective game. It's simply brilliant.
Its a great game, but its more of a logic game than a sierra-style adventure in any way: no inventory, no dialog trees, no verbs, and no objects to interact with!
IIRC, the only interaction with the scene is using the pocketwatch on a corpse.
In the same category of deduction games: The Case of the Golden Idol [1]. Very much reproduces the 1990s game vibe, and a very unique game with an absolutely unique, bonkers story universe. The story extends to the excellent (but aesthetically blander, in my opinion) sequel.
Seconded. I grew up with Lucasarts (and Sierra, to a lesser extent) point and clicks, but somehow I find they had the side effect to pretty much being the peak of that specific type of adventure game, so even if there are plenty of indie modern games of the same style, they somehow never reach the heights of the originals they are inspired by.
For this reason, I find much more interesting those modern games that scratch the same itch but try different mechanics and styles.
Obra Dinn and Golden Idol are for sure in my top three of post-2000 adventure games, and I would add Outer Wilds at the top.
I've enjoyed many of Wadjet Eye's games. Primordia [1] was fantastic, and just as good as the oldies. The Blackwell series, which I've not yet played, is universally loved.
Anyone who liked Obra Dinn and Golden Idol might also like The Roottrees Are Dead. The presentation might be a little less polished, but the deduction is fun.
Her Story is also worth mentioning. Good acting, very polished presentation. Fun retro feel and a great gameplay loop. The only possible drawback is that there's no clear victory (this seems to be typical of Sam Barlow games, which are all worth playing). You're left to come to your own conclusion, which may or may not be correct.
Funeral for the Sun also came out recently. I'd call it more guess-y than Obra Dinn or the Golden Idol, but also very fun.
Other smaller games in this niche would be "Death at Fleming Manor" (it's a bit laboursome to play) and "The Seance at Blake Manor" (Took me a bit to get used to, but honestly very interesting), if we're collecting. Which we should. Maybe I need a blog.
To add to your list, Machinarium is an absolute masterpiece. Beautiful hand drawn art, and some of the best puzzles in the genre (IMO). Anything from Amanita Design is worth playing, but it takes the cake.
And they announced the sequel just a few weeks ago!
My favourite Amanita games are the Samarost series. Something about the lack of dialogue, devious puzzles, quirky humour, and unique aesthetic combining sci-fi with a world of moss, wood, and weird junk.
Creaks was also excellent, albeit a very different vibe. I couldn't quite get into Phonopolis, although the art direction is stunning.
Going back isn't enough. What I wanted again was the feeling of seeing and playing those games for the first time. The awe. My kids were born in a world where color graphics and digital sound were everywhere so nothing is impressive to them.
I can very much recommend looking at games developed and published by Wadjet Eye Games.
You can see the learning throughout the years, with the Blackwell Chronicles being a bit linear, and some games in between being a bit of a miss.
But "Unavowed" or the new "Old Skies" are excellent games I consider on par with the old golden age. "Technobabylon", "Resonance" and "The Excavation of Hob's Barrow" are also very far up.
These games gave me the same sense of wonder and curiosity in an adventure puzzle game in the same way that Elden Ring reminded me of what it was like to experience Hyrule Field for the first time in Ocarina of Time.
That said, I tried playing it again recently and the puzzles do not hold up. Extremely frustrating and unsatisfying solutions.
I would not be opposed to a remaster of the game that also fixes some of the puzzles - similar to what the Cyan team (controversially) did with their Myst and Riven remakes.
I think the world has just changed. Back then, the puzzles were appreciated for being hard, because often you would get the demo of the game on a CD bundled with a magazine and it would kind of suck to be done in 10 minutes, whereas with a challenge (even an obtuse one) you could play the demo over and over, enjoying the sights and sounds, without feeling like you were wasting time on a "replay", since you hadn't yet cracked it. On top of that there wasn't really a glut of these kinds of almost indie-styled yet big studio games in the adventure genre so it would be one of the few games you'd have bought, and again it would suck to be done with it too soon. (And you always had gamefaqs should you decide otherwise.)
There were a couple of games though (like the curse of monkey island) that gave you a bit of a choice on how much you cared about spending time on puzzles.
In the TikTok era, you could probably make the argument that even a shape matching puzzle is obtuse and overly difficult and it could be a popular opinion.
The Nintendo DS stimulated a bit of a renaissance in point-and-click adventure games -- maybe because the touch screen lent itself so well to that style of gameplay.
The first Ace Attorney game is riveting from start to finish.
The Professor Layton games are all great.
I've read that Hotel Dusk and Last Window are both really good but haven't gotten around to playing them myself. I can vouch for Last Window's soundtrack, though, which is spectacular.
Grim Fandango is absolutely one of the best games of all time. Yes, some of the puzzles are very difficult. I had to read a walkthrough to figure out the cat race ticket number.
I think there's only really two real sets of artwork - the EGA and VGA releases. Some (EGA running on CGA or Hercules, VGA running on EGA) dither down the artwork rather than there being extra artwork for there, and the other versions are largely derived from whichever of EGA and VGA was a better fit for the target platform. Still a meaningful amount of work (especially reducing the 256 colour VGA art to 32 colours for the Amiga port), but it's the kind of thing that happened in games porting in that era.
Earlier this year I studied a few of the Amiga portraits and yes, they reduced VGA to fit in 5 bitplanes (32 colors), but they actually don't even use all of the colors. I found them to be around 20-25, keeping _more than a few_ aside for, say, the GUI.
Except in close-up chat mode, from memory all you get is text and a background color for the text, and not much cursor or anything else. So I'm still wondering why they didn't allow themselves a couple more color indices, which can go a long way even without dithering and anti-aliasing (which there isn't too much of in the VGA portraits). Maybe it ended up compressing a bit better.
I replayed the series recently and I think the gameplay didn't age that well especially after you played some japanese puzzle games like Professor Layton
or Ace Attorney. It's not the difficulty of the puzzles but rather there is almost nothing intuitive about them and a lot of times they are detached from the story. The story, the writing, the humor, and the characters holds up of course but not the gameplay.
I love both game series, but Ace Attorney has multiple moments where you lose by presenting evidence too early or the "wrong" piece of evidence (even though it would also prove your case). The later games are better but even the Great Ace Attorney has instances of this.
Professor Layton almost all the way through includes trick puzzles which have non obvious answers as well.
Obviously the games aren't perfectly obvious and later games are much better, but they are generally much more obvious than something like King's Quest which was properly brutal. I remember needing occasional hints to manage monkey island but nothing like completing King's Quest where I had to constantly check the walkthrough.
I think this is a problem of many of those old click to play
adventures.
For instance, I found Leisure Suit Larry I in many ways better,
from the gameplay, than "Leisure Suit Larry: Love for Sail!".
Now, the latter made much more use of the mouse, so it was easier
and simpler for most players; but I found LSL 1 just so convenient
and quite fast to play, if you could handle the keyboard well. It
was of course nowhere near as convenient as clickety-click via the
mouse, but I had that impression several times with games. SimCity
1 was IMO much nicer to play than later simcities; same impression
I had with civilization, the actual gameplay got progressively more
annoying, slower and laggier.
I am very impressed how the 32-color Amiga version is close to the 256-color VGA version (and how much the Atari ST is lagging behind, more similar to the EGA version :)
The Amiga graphics chip had a palette of 4096 colors, you were just limited to 32 at the same time, or 64 with half bright tones, or more with chip/interrupt tricks. I doubt the latter was used on something like monkey island though.
IIRC with Amiga you had a large overall palette like 4096, and a limitation of 32 or 64 colors per scan line/row, but you could vary the colors per row from the overall palette
Was always jealous of friends with Amiga, the games always looked so much better than anything else at the time (helped by bigger tv's and scan lines no doubt).
Brilliant design for a brilliant game. I remember my dad showing the opening mountaintop scene with campfire. Like others have said, remains my favourite.
My "cheap" little 286 had hercules mono graphics. I got that option rather than CGA for the better text resolution as I was interested in programming and such more than games. I had an "emulator" TSR that would allow many games not supporting it to work in CGA mode.
Not generally. But I had a friend and I remember seeing the intro of "Das Boot" and "Wolfpack" on his PC with hercules card. I remember thinking "That looks way better on our 286er"
I tried, but it was in English and I didn't speak it at the time. Also, there was an util called SimCGA that allowed me to play many other games in my humble 286.
I did have Maniac Mansion in my language, though, so I also played that.
I did. We were poor and got an old IBM XT with Hercules graphics card in the early '90s from a family friend. I played the hell out of that machine and was always excited when a game supported it. It did have a CGA emulation mode, so I was able to rough it with some games.
I remember being impressed by all these editions even as a teen in the nineties. It's pretty uncommon, especially as a game with graphics on this level. What a nice site that goes in depth with the differences!
Beatiful, when comparing PC and Mac versions, I got the feeling that the Mac screenshot has the old Mac gamma 1.8 VS PC gamma 2.2 that Apple started to use not that long time ago...
Ron Gilbert was such a hero for me, and I'm always amazed at what an incredible story-rich gaming experience you could squeeze onto 256 colours and four floppy disks.
I disagree, the VGA looked the best for me. The Amiga is close, but one has to go a notch down in graphics, I prefer the EGA low res for its charm. Not that the Amiga one didn't look great. I had much better audio on my Amiga 1200 running Monkey Island.
The VGA does look the best. Still it is impressive that the Amiga version looked that close while having only 1/8th of the colors. Great use of palettes and dithering, I wonder if halfbrite was used.
Sure, it has less colors, but the overall feel is better.
Consider the character sprites, they seem to be based on EGA, which was the original intent, and it shows. See also the scumm bar. There's some ugly shiny highlights in VGA which Amiga version doesn't have. The overall graphical language is simply better.
Whoever made these artistic decisions knew what they were doing.
100%. What Steve Purcell and Mark Ferrari achieved with those 16 colors is simply genius. The 256 color version added detail, but lost much of the boldness and elegance of the EGA version.
I played that version only much later (originally I had it on Amiga and then PC VGA), but the EGA version has indeed a unique charm of its own. It really feels like an alternative, equally good looking relase rather than a downgraded version of the VGA one, which makes sense as iirc it was developed and shipped first.
Some time ago I read a long recollection of Mark Ferrari on the origins of the graphics, but now I can't find it for the best of me. There's a very nice interview where it explains it a bit at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ri4_3P2Oh14 , though.
I had 8 bit machines (Spectrum and C64) and then got an Amiga A500. I remember at the time being nothing short of appalled by CGA[0] colour palettes, since CGA was still pretty commonplace in the late 80s and even the early 90s (e.g., at school).
It cemented an opinion that PC hardware of the era was overpriced, underperforming, and uninteresting.
I’ve subsequently developed a healthy respect for what developers and artists have been able to achieve within the constraints of CGA but I have no nostalgia for it. The CGA demoscene is very much worth checking out though - loads of super impressive videos on YouTube.
[0] We used to refer to CGA as Crap Graphics Array, and I seriously doubt we were alone.
The sheer amount of talent that went into art, audio and coding back then, the limitations of the hardware really forced the best out of people in many cases.
I compared my "gaming pc" of old (286 with EGA) to my current one via ChatGPT and it's quite mind boggling;
"I’d say roughly 100,000× the CPU computing power, with millions× or more on suitable work handled by the GPU."
I think I played it on PC back then, but I am not 100%
certain anymore; could have been on Amiga too. Interestingly
the Macintosh version looks the best to me therein, but I am
also not absolutely sure about that since it seems to be
differently scaled than the PC version. I wish I would have
noted down back then what I used and played. And when.
Have a listen of the intro song. They are quite distinct on the different soundcards and machines. This might trigger your memory to identify which music is the one you heard all those years ago.
it's kinda awesome how back then they could keep coming out with new versions on the shelves, if we did that with a game these days it would get all kinds of hate but back then it was the total opposite
Had the OG Amiga version and always wondered why it looked different on my friends PC. Back then I was a kid and thought it was the different CRT monitor and not 16 v 256 colors lol
I see a few people saying they couldn’t get used to CGA, that it was absurd, or worse than no graphics at all.
I can relate to that. But as I’ve aged I’ve appreciated just how much was done with less back. I mean that literally: we couldn’t afford a computer so my dad would haul home his work computer each weekend. We’d call BBS’ on it, print stuff. Play shareware games. It pissed my mom off because it took up half the dinner table. But my brother learned to code this way too.
So later on when my friends got EGA and VGA, CGA meant “poor.”
Fast forward many years and I have kids and were in better financial circumstances than my dad and mom back then. My kids have MacBooks. One of their friends was over one night and was visibly embarrassed that all she had was the school assigned Chromebook. She and my daughter were doing homework and her friend said that she wished her family could afford better laptops.
I didn’t want to embarrass her but then next morning after I made pancakes and I was sitting at the table I was like hey let’s take a look at these Chromebooks (we had an old one sitting around) and the three of us sat there and in about an hour and a half they’d put together a very simple farm game in the spirit of Stardew Valley on PICO-8.
Point being, we live in a world where especially with AI, it’s easy to think we can do everything. And it can feel like that, which means that when you can’t, you feel worse that you can’t because it would appear everyone else is doing amazing things with no limits.
But maybe we need more limits on things. Maybe that 4 color palette forced devs and artists to be creative back then in ways that make things better for everyone.
Design depends largely on constraints.
— Charles Eames
I have often wondered if the corollary to this is that without constraints design becomes unnecessary. I used to play Fortnite and PUBG a bit and the UI there clearly suffers from excess of available computing power.
Game devs should develope and test on average hardware, but that's hardly the case.
It’s less about performance and more that they can throw insane UI and graphics at it because the hardware will render it. It’s all bad design.
It's a well-known effect in the study of creativity. And it's not just the presence of significant physical or engineering constraints, even the presence of minor arbitrary constraints can spark creativity in unrelated aspects of the work.
For example, 'Weekend Film' competitions have long introduced minor arbitrary constraints only announced at the start to prevent pre-work, such as "Blue socks must be seen and at least one character must have an accent". Often, the socks would be only be seen in the background for a few frames and the accented character would be a passerby overheard for 2 seconds, yet filmmakers, judges and audiences found the presence of the constraints caused all the projects to be more creatively diverse in completely unrelated ways.
Interestingly, the effect doesn't have one name. Artists and designers have terms for it, cognitive psychologists have another term, behavioral/organizational sciences and engineering/innovation research each have their own literature as well.
Constraints foster creativity and creation, and from that experience learning and pride in one’s achievements springs.
Before it was a dumpster fire Twitter’s 140 character constraint made it fun. An infinity of possibility leaves most of us motionless.
> ....as I’ve aged I’ve appreciated just how much was done with less back [then].
As a kid and teen CGA and EGA looked absurd to me, even when that was the best one could get at home. So I waited until VGA to get into PC gaming. Now in middle age and having tried my hand at VGA+ art, it is delightful to see well rendered at at every color depth.
The 'could not get used to CGA' requires context. Back then I had a PC with Hercules and CGA (with a hardware switch at the back of the computer), so that was the maximum and I did not know better for a few years. When I moved to VGA then of course I preferred it over CGA, but for several years I did not 'get used with CGA', I only knew CGA. Yeah, today I would not go for a CGA graphics in a game ... so what? That's irrelevant.
It was CGA specifically that was terrible, though. I'd take 4-shade grey Gameboy graphics over that color palette. There's nothing wrong with 4 colors per se, but there's a lot wrong with those four colors.
A couple more registers to have some kind of selection of the colors would have gone a long way.
Does anyone else remember the (at the time) searing brightness of CGA and EGA monitors? It’s something I always noticed when compared to my Amiga monitor and to VGA that followed. I kinda miss it :)
Every time I see CGA graphics in cyan, magenta, black and white it reminds me of my youth and how 'cold' it felt at the time to see those graphics, I could never really get used to it. When EGA/VGA graphics came along it felt so warm and in my experience games really started to come to life.
Respect for the graphics artists in general for that time to be able to make something out of almost nothing, four colors or less and/or black and white low resolution.
Yeah, CGA was really absurd, I'm glad I've never had a computer with that
I never understood the choice of default CGA palette colors. amber and green wasn't much nicer to me, and it was even more rare in games.
though, "The Eternal Castle Remastered" (2019) used the same palette, and it was pretty good.
The CGA palettes were designed with three main objectives: good contrast on composite and black and white displays, high contrast productivity UX, and simple ttl circuitry. There was a limit of 16 colours, but if you wanted to step up resolution you had to compromise by selecting fewer colors. A major compromise choice was resolution vs colours. High resolution cost you your magenta and yellow. Have a google for the mode 4 and mode 5 pallets and mathematically why they are the way they are, it’s super interesting if you’re in to retro tech.
In the later era, as EGA and VGA gained, I think CGA became a bolt on by some game devs, to accommodate that dwindling audience, so the problem was compounded by it being very second class citizen.
Ditto. My first ibm compatible was CGA, and those pallets represent a really specific era in my memories. I actually jumped from CGA to VGA (DOS to Win3.1 as well!) and it was like somebody had switched on all the lights in a precisely dark room.
*previously
Not graphics, but even the PC speaker intro had some significant effort put into it, considering how limited it was as a sound source.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1IOL4q5tDDQ
Hearing the Monkey Island theme played how it would have been on a high end sound card is crazy. PC speakers did their best but it was composed as a damn symphony.
https://youtu.be/a324ykKV-7Y?is=Dn0qcERhEasBjloQ
Having grown up gaming on PC speaker I only knew the wavetable MIDI miracles from hearsay. Now any time I touch some DOSbox retro memory I'm nothing but disappointed becausr those MIDI tunes? They are just that, tinny voyages through the general MIDI instrument set where well made PC speaker programming can have awesome roughness.
You should be able to force pc speaker only if you go through the config.
Many MIDI things sound better on old hardware than they do via modern reproduction. FM chips were very different from wavetable, and there's quite a lot of variation besides. It's no wonder some music sounds goofy, now --it was written with a very different palette of sounds.
Games which were made especially for CGA did often look really cool.
Possibly not the best example but I do feel like Alley Cat looked great in CGA: https://i.ibb.co/wNDvgzQ8/alleycat.gif
I played that game and couldn't understand why someone would do that. Games on my Commodore 64 looked much better.
The CGA version of Defender of the Crown also looked quite good for what it was, although most other conversions looked better.
Jim Sachs 320 x 200, 32 color art for the original Amiga version was amazing.
I came to comment on the same... I grew up with CGA graphics for my first games, too. It was, in many ways, worse than no color at all. But the jarring visuals and the feeling of it will always stay with me.
I don't know why this site calls CGA "16 color" (the size of the CGA palette, of which 4 could be used at a time at this game's resolution), while also calling EGA "16 color" (when EGA uses 16 colors at a time from a palette of 64).
I fed this question to Gemini (compare CGA vs EGA) and it made the same category error in its distinction, calling both "16 color". So, to the human that didn't check their slop site, maybe you should fix that.
You could see all 16 at once in CGA text mode, and in "graphics" modes derived from that: https://youtu.be/G66KL-hxxKI
There were two PC floppy versions - 16 colour and 256 colour. The 16 colour version had fallbacks for CGA and Hercules, the 256 colour version had a fallback for EGA. So the CGA screenshot is the 16 colour version running with CGA fallback, and this is also why there's a set of "256 colour EGA" shots. It's a little confusing, but it's correct.
A friend has a composite extra monitor for the CGA output and I was amazed to discover that it used composite to generate more color for supporting games.
On composite, the game can display more colors. I never knew at the time and was only aware of that a decade ago. ScummVM and DOSBox but knows how to render composite.
This while fully understandable, has one have to go back even further to what it felt like to actually be able to display any graphics at all and what that felt like ...
Lucky you that at least you had a CGA monitor. The were very expensive in my country. I used a Hercules monitor with SIMCGA; it was probably one of the first DOS programs I learned to run.
Hey! I had a CGA monitor for 10+ years. While I did mildly envy the EGA friends, it never felt bad to me while I had it.
Monkey Island II was one of the reasons I got into computers as a kid originally (an industry where I of course work today).
The latest Monkey Island was a disappointment - not the artwork, the Disney nature of it. It was bubbly zany, had a child and a dad as narrators and had music and other aspects of a children's movie. Maybe I didn't age enough and didn't reproduce enough to fit the creator's demographic, but I miss the self deprecating and slightly mysterious aura of the early games.
VGA was beautiful back then, EGA was definitely tolerable. Now they are making EGA games on Steam for die-hard adventure gamers.
You don't need photorealism to make a good game.
Hell, people used to listen to football games (in the UK sense too) and baseball games on the radio. Imagination is a powerful thing. It's the content that matters.
Beautiful. I love the CGA interface.
When I see monkey island I always think of the Amiga copy protection on monkey island 2. The game was on something like 13 floppies that you had to keep switching but there was only super hard copy protection on disk 7 or something so you'd get part way through the game before getting scuppered. (I was only about 10 years old).
The Lucasfilm Games artists did amazing work with limited color palettes. You can make the argument that the 16-color versions of Secret of Monkey Island and LOOM actually look better than the 256-color versions.
Always thought the Amiga versions of Monkey Island and Loom are the best in terms of graphics, vibe and music.
Oh, the nostalgia! I like the Borland Turbo Vision UI look of the site, which most DOS apps used at the time.
The first time I played Monkey Island on an Hercules monitor, it made me fall in love with graphic adventures. Years later, I played the VGA CD version. At that time, I bought the Monkey Island CD, Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, and Day of the Tentacle. They were the peak of LucasGames.
Sometimes I really wish i could back to this time of my life. Those adventure games had a certain magic that hasn't been reproduced so far. There are some good throw back games on steam, but somehow its different. Is it because I am older now? Would be interesting to be able to experience them from scratch with the mind of my present being.
Anyway, just on to of my mind: - Indiana Jones , especially the one with the Paris underground and the Nazi fortress. Forgot the name.
- Monkey Islands
- Phantasmagoria 2
- Baphomets Curse 1 and 2 , especially 1.
- Kings Quest 7 (god, the drawings. Like a Disney movie)
- Simon the Sorcerer
All bangers!!!!!
So many crazy memories. They all had really good stories, a nice humour, tough puzzles and really good drawing. Idk, I really can succumb to nostalgia here :-)
It's different in the core mechanic, but if you haven't played Return of the Obra Dinn, it's one of the most rewarding, well-crafted games I've experienced in the past decade, and scratched a similar itch of the old Sierra games, though again, not a pure text or point and click adventure... more a 3D, 1-bit murder mystery done as a detective game. It's simply brilliant.
Its a great game, but its more of a logic game than a sierra-style adventure in any way: no inventory, no dialog trees, no verbs, and no objects to interact with!
IIRC, the only interaction with the scene is using the pocketwatch on a corpse.
In the same category of deduction games: The Case of the Golden Idol [1]. Very much reproduces the 1990s game vibe, and a very unique game with an absolutely unique, bonkers story universe. The story extends to the excellent (but aesthetically blander, in my opinion) sequel.
[1] https://store.steampowered.com/app/1677770/The_Case_of_the_G...
Seconded. I grew up with Lucasarts (and Sierra, to a lesser extent) point and clicks, but somehow I find they had the side effect to pretty much being the peak of that specific type of adventure game, so even if there are plenty of indie modern games of the same style, they somehow never reach the heights of the originals they are inspired by.
For this reason, I find much more interesting those modern games that scratch the same itch but try different mechanics and styles.
Obra Dinn and Golden Idol are for sure in my top three of post-2000 adventure games, and I would add Outer Wilds at the top.
I'd put up Lamplight City [1] with the best of 'em.
1. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamplight_City]
I've enjoyed many of Wadjet Eye's games. Primordia [1] was fantastic, and just as good as the oldies. The Blackwell series, which I've not yet played, is universally loved.
[1] https://store.steampowered.com/app/227000/Primordia/
That one and the sequel are very good, but not adventure games - more puzzle in a box. Still very much worth it!
Anyone who liked Obra Dinn and Golden Idol might also like The Roottrees Are Dead. The presentation might be a little less polished, but the deduction is fun.
Her Story is also worth mentioning. Good acting, very polished presentation. Fun retro feel and a great gameplay loop. The only possible drawback is that there's no clear victory (this seems to be typical of Sam Barlow games, which are all worth playing). You're left to come to your own conclusion, which may or may not be correct.
Funeral for the Sun also came out recently. I'd call it more guess-y than Obra Dinn or the Golden Idol, but also very fun.
Other smaller games in this niche would be "Death at Fleming Manor" (it's a bit laboursome to play) and "The Seance at Blake Manor" (Took me a bit to get used to, but honestly very interesting), if we're collecting. Which we should. Maybe I need a blog.
Funeral for the Sun looks cool. Thanks for the recommendation.
I'll add the Broken Sword games to the recommendations. They are classic point-and-click adventures. Also Runaway.
You can experience them. Just type those titles into a search engine.
I wrote: "Would be interesting to be able to experience them *from scratch* with the mind of my present being"
To add to your list, Machinarium is an absolute masterpiece. Beautiful hand drawn art, and some of the best puzzles in the genre (IMO). Anything from Amanita Design is worth playing, but it takes the cake.
And they announced the sequel just a few weeks ago!
My favourite Amanita games are the Samarost series. Something about the lack of dialogue, devious puzzles, quirky humour, and unique aesthetic combining sci-fi with a world of moss, wood, and weird junk.
Creaks was also excellent, albeit a very different vibe. I couldn't quite get into Phonopolis, although the art direction is stunning.
> the Paris underground
It was Venice underground, The Last Crusade (Indy3.exe)
> Simon the Sorcerer
That's not common to hear, thanks for the throwback ;)
To me, Simon the Sorcerer was almost the Harry Potter universe but 20 years earlier, with the bright purples and cosy taverns...
til Phantasmagoria had sequel.....!
Don't we all?
Going back isn't enough. What I wanted again was the feeling of seeing and playing those games for the first time. The awe. My kids were born in a world where color graphics and digital sound were everywhere so nothing is impressive to them.
I can very much recommend looking at games developed and published by Wadjet Eye Games.
You can see the learning throughout the years, with the Blackwell Chronicles being a bit linear, and some games in between being a bit of a miss.
But "Unavowed" or the new "Old Skies" are excellent games I consider on par with the old golden age. "Technobabylon", "Resonance" and "The Excavation of Hob's Barrow" are also very far up.
Yes Technobabylon was pretty good. Need to check the others! Thanks
I played Gemini Rue. It was pretty good, enough to remember.
Play Return of the Obra Dinn and The Outer Wilds.
These games gave me the same sense of wonder and curiosity in an adventure puzzle game in the same way that Elden Ring reminded me of what it was like to experience Hyrule Field for the first time in Ocarina of Time.
Also Loom and Dig
loved both
I miss scumvm games. they could make new ones id play
Have you seen all the free games you can play on scummvm?
https://www.scummvm.org/games/
Thanks for reminding me about Beneath a Steel Sky. Still need to play that one :)
Not quite the same thing, but I found the Ace Attorney series was fun in a similar way. Same with Ghost Trick, by the same creator.
And Grim Fandango if you hadn't played it.
Stylistically, Grim Fandango is a 10/10.
That said, I tried playing it again recently and the puzzles do not hold up. Extremely frustrating and unsatisfying solutions.
I would not be opposed to a remaster of the game that also fixes some of the puzzles - similar to what the Cyan team (controversially) did with their Myst and Riven remakes.
I think the world has just changed. Back then, the puzzles were appreciated for being hard, because often you would get the demo of the game on a CD bundled with a magazine and it would kind of suck to be done in 10 minutes, whereas with a challenge (even an obtuse one) you could play the demo over and over, enjoying the sights and sounds, without feeling like you were wasting time on a "replay", since you hadn't yet cracked it. On top of that there wasn't really a glut of these kinds of almost indie-styled yet big studio games in the adventure genre so it would be one of the few games you'd have bought, and again it would suck to be done with it too soon. (And you always had gamefaqs should you decide otherwise.)
There were a couple of games though (like the curse of monkey island) that gave you a bit of a choice on how much you cared about spending time on puzzles.
In the TikTok era, you could probably make the argument that even a shape matching puzzle is obtuse and overly difficult and it could be a popular opinion.
The Nintendo DS stimulated a bit of a renaissance in point-and-click adventure games -- maybe because the touch screen lent itself so well to that style of gameplay.
The first Ace Attorney game is riveting from start to finish.
The Professor Layton games are all great.
I've read that Hotel Dusk and Last Window are both really good but haven't gotten around to playing them myself. I can vouch for Last Window's soundtrack, though, which is spectacular.
Grim Fandango is absolutely one of the best games of all time. Yes, some of the puzzles are very difficult. I had to read a walkthrough to figure out the cat race ticket number.
I felt the same magic as an adult twice.
Once with Machinarium, and again with A Short Hike
Nice. I want to hear each rendition of the opening title theme.
I see retro, I upvote. Good times back then with Monkey Island, great art, great adventure game.
It’s an incredible that graphics artists provide 13+ variations on the same artwork, especially without the help of modern tools.
I think there's only really two real sets of artwork - the EGA and VGA releases. Some (EGA running on CGA or Hercules, VGA running on EGA) dither down the artwork rather than there being extra artwork for there, and the other versions are largely derived from whichever of EGA and VGA was a better fit for the target platform. Still a meaningful amount of work (especially reducing the 256 colour VGA art to 32 colours for the Amiga port), but it's the kind of thing that happened in games porting in that era.
Earlier this year I studied a few of the Amiga portraits and yes, they reduced VGA to fit in 5 bitplanes (32 colors), but they actually don't even use all of the colors. I found them to be around 20-25, keeping _more than a few_ aside for, say, the GUI.
Except in close-up chat mode, from memory all you get is text and a background color for the text, and not much cursor or anything else. So I'm still wondering why they didn't allow themselves a couple more color indices, which can go a long way even without dithering and anti-aliasing (which there isn't too much of in the VGA portraits). Maybe it ended up compressing a bit better.
It’s very obvious the Hercules was just a “we could” port - probably so they could use more machines for testing.
If you find a game that has a natural Hercules mode they often kicked serious ass, being at resolutions not achieved until VGA.
What sort of modern tools do you think would make it easier?
Photoshop? Or really any modern image editing software vs what was available in the late 80s early 90s
I replayed the series recently and I think the gameplay didn't age that well especially after you played some japanese puzzle games like Professor Layton or Ace Attorney. It's not the difficulty of the puzzles but rather there is almost nothing intuitive about them and a lot of times they are detached from the story. The story, the writing, the humor, and the characters holds up of course but not the gameplay.
I love both game series, but Ace Attorney has multiple moments where you lose by presenting evidence too early or the "wrong" piece of evidence (even though it would also prove your case). The later games are better but even the Great Ace Attorney has instances of this.
Professor Layton almost all the way through includes trick puzzles which have non obvious answers as well.
Obviously the games aren't perfectly obvious and later games are much better, but they are generally much more obvious than something like King's Quest which was properly brutal. I remember needing occasional hints to manage monkey island but nothing like completing King's Quest where I had to constantly check the walkthrough.
I think this is a problem of many of those old click to play adventures.
For instance, I found Leisure Suit Larry I in many ways better, from the gameplay, than "Leisure Suit Larry: Love for Sail!". Now, the latter made much more use of the mouse, so it was easier and simpler for most players; but I found LSL 1 just so convenient and quite fast to play, if you could handle the keyboard well. It was of course nowhere near as convenient as clickety-click via the mouse, but I had that impression several times with games. SimCity 1 was IMO much nicer to play than later simcities; same impression I had with civilization, the actual gameplay got progressively more annoying, slower and laggier.
I am very impressed how the 32-color Amiga version is close to the 256-color VGA version (and how much the Atari ST is lagging behind, more similar to the EGA version :)
The pirate close-up (pointed out by https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50495836) confirms: the Atari ST graphics are ported from the EGA version, while Amiga is based off VGA.
The Amiga graphics chip had a palette of 4096 colors, you were just limited to 32 at the same time, or 64 with half bright tones, or more with chip/interrupt tricks. I doubt the latter was used on something like monkey island though.
IIRC with Amiga you had a large overall palette like 4096, and a limitation of 32 or 64 colors per scan line/row, but you could vary the colors per row from the overall palette
You're right, I misremembered. The copper chip did the scanline magic, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_Original_Chip_Set#Copper.
Was always jealous of friends with Amiga, the games always looked so much better than anything else at the time (helped by bigger tv's and scan lines no doubt).
Brilliant design for a brilliant game. I remember my dad showing the opening mountaintop scene with campfire. Like others have said, remains my favourite.
ux 10/10 I couldn't have imagined a better one
also works great on mobile.. +1
DOS was peak UI.
That’s pretty cool.
Technically not all. The anniversary re-release is missing.
Don't miss all the options in the menu bar at the top of the screen
TurboVision is the best bit about this :)
Yeah it's very nostalgic for me also. I just made a Turbo Vision UI for Claude Code.
https://github.com/runvnc/tvclaude
I immediately revived an old feud and compared the Amiga and Atari ST versions... Amiga, definitely. Ha!
Who ever played games on hercules card? I never met or heard of them
I did. My XT had a Hercules card and an MDA card.
Raises hand!
My "cheap" little 286 had hercules mono graphics. I got that option rather than CGA for the better text resolution as I was interested in programming and such more than games. I had an "emulator" TSR that would allow many games not supporting it to work in CGA mode.
Not generally. But I had a friend and I remember seeing the intro of "Das Boot" and "Wolfpack" on his PC with hercules card. I remember thinking "That looks way better on our 286er"
Did too
Fond memories of Prince of Persia on the little 286 that could
I played SimCity on the Hercules and it wasn’t until SimCity 2000 on superVGA that I really felt it was matched.
And I kept that Hercules card running long after we were straight VGA as it could work with it at the same time (different memory area).
I tried, but it was in English and I didn't speak it at the time. Also, there was an util called SimCGA that allowed me to play many other games in my humble 286.
I did have Maniac Mansion in my language, though, so I also played that.
I did. We were poor and got an old IBM XT with Hercules graphics card in the early '90s from a family friend. I played the hell out of that machine and was always excited when a game supported it. It did have a CGA emulation mode, so I was able to rough it with some games.
I remember being impressed by all these editions even as a teen in the nineties. It's pretty uncommon, especially as a game with graphics on this level. What a nice site that goes in depth with the differences!
Beatiful, when comparing PC and Mac versions, I got the feeling that the Mac screenshot has the old Mac gamma 1.8 VS PC gamma 2.2 that Apple started to use not that long time ago...
Played this on the Amiga when it first came out. It was a magical time back then to experience a generational leap in gaming.
Ron Gilbert was such a hero for me, and I'm always amazed at what an incredible story-rich gaming experience you could squeeze onto 256 colours and four floppy disks.
I got the monkey island tune ringing in my ears, thanks for replacing the 7/365 jingle bells for at least a moment!
As expected, Amiga version looked the best.
I disagree, the VGA looked the best for me. The Amiga is close, but one has to go a notch down in graphics, I prefer the EGA low res for its charm. Not that the Amiga one didn't look great. I had much better audio on my Amiga 1200 running Monkey Island.
The VGA does look the best. Still it is impressive that the Amiga version looked that close while having only 1/8th of the colors. Great use of palettes and dithering, I wonder if halfbrite was used.
I prefer Amiga.
Sure, it has less colors, but the overall feel is better.
Consider the character sprites, they seem to be based on EGA, which was the original intent, and it shows. See also the scumm bar. There's some ugly shiny highlights in VGA which Amiga version doesn't have. The overall graphical language is simply better.
Whoever made these artistic decisions knew what they were doing.
The EGA one is the true version for me
100%. What Steve Purcell and Mark Ferrari achieved with those 16 colors is simply genius. The 256 color version added detail, but lost much of the boldness and elegance of the EGA version.
I played that version only much later (originally I had it on Amiga and then PC VGA), but the EGA version has indeed a unique charm of its own. It really feels like an alternative, equally good looking relase rather than a downgraded version of the VGA one, which makes sense as iirc it was developed and shipped first.
Some reasons as to why it can look better at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26445522
Some time ago I read a long recollection of Mark Ferrari on the origins of the graphics, but now I can't find it for the best of me. There's a very nice interview where it explains it a bit at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ri4_3P2Oh14 , though.
a long explanation or interview by Mark
ops, that last line shouldn't be there
Claude, please rewrite this game in GTA VI style graphics.
GROGtastic.
I remember this as a whole immersive world, is funny to look back and realise that it was all only in 16 colours.
I had 8 bit machines (Spectrum and C64) and then got an Amiga A500. I remember at the time being nothing short of appalled by CGA[0] colour palettes, since CGA was still pretty commonplace in the late 80s and even the early 90s (e.g., at school).
It cemented an opinion that PC hardware of the era was overpriced, underperforming, and uninteresting.
I’ve subsequently developed a healthy respect for what developers and artists have been able to achieve within the constraints of CGA but I have no nostalgia for it. The CGA demoscene is very much worth checking out though - loads of super impressive videos on YouTube.
[0] We used to refer to CGA as Crap Graphics Array, and I seriously doubt we were alone.
I like seeing people make beautiful things. This is a very beautiful site imo
OT:
Didnt know that there are by today 13 versions and that they extended the productline ad infinitum :-D
IMHO, VGA looks by far the best, but EGA is a second one! It has a lot of charm.
The contrast between VGA and EGA "pirate close up" cracked me up!
Same! That guy looks so jolly and docile in EGA
This is beautiful, thanks for making it. My fav game of all time
This was posted 3 times and for whatever reason.
This post did well.
Guess the right people were awake to upvote it
CGA... oh man, it's like I'm a kid again :)
The difference in the pirate close-ups is amusing.
no love for the Atari 2600 or Apple II versions?
Beautiful, well done :)
"All" 13 versions. But no Commodore 64?
The sheer amount of talent that went into art, audio and coding back then, the limitations of the hardware really forced the best out of people in many cases.
I compared my "gaming pc" of old (286 with EGA) to my current one via ChatGPT and it's quite mind boggling; "I’d say roughly 100,000× the CPU computing power, with millions× or more on suitable work handled by the GPU."
There's a SEGA CD version! Never knew that.
Oh cool there's a Gobliiins Switch ROM that runs on the average potato ... Nobody bother me for the rest of the weekend, please!
AND all the discworlds have PS1 ROMs. I'm going to have to report in sick. Everybody else is doing it for GTA6 anyway.
You know, we really need a PC game ROM standard ...
I think I played it on PC back then, but I am not 100% certain anymore; could have been on Amiga too. Interestingly the Macintosh version looks the best to me therein, but I am also not absolutely sure about that since it seems to be differently scaled than the PC version. I wish I would have noted down back then what I used and played. And when.
Have a listen of the intro song. They are quite distinct on the different soundcards and machines. This might trigger your memory to identify which music is the one you heard all those years ago.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fr-84mjV3CI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FpmpBLANYwM
The music for the second part is even more distinct.
it's kinda awesome how back then they could keep coming out with new versions on the shelves, if we did that with a game these days it would get all kinds of hate but back then it was the total opposite
Had the OG Amiga version and always wondered why it looked different on my friends PC. Back then I was a kid and thought it was the different CRT monitor and not 16 v 256 colors lol
neat :thumbsup:
lfg so clean
The last two feels like a downgrade after Mac for some reason