You don't have to agree, but you're quoting out of context. Here's the lead-in:
> Gamers would have to accept jagged edges, tearing textures, and a generalized visual crudity in 3D games for quite some time to come. A freeze-frame visual comparison with the games the industry had been making immediately before the 3D revolution did the new ones no favors: the games coming out of studios like Sierra and LucasArts had become genuinely beautiful by the early 1990s, thanks to those companies’ rooms full of dedicated pixel artists. It would take a considerable amount of time before 3D games would look anywhere near this nice
Doom, Mario, and Megaman all work extremely well within their limitations. The art is able to unambiguously present a world with atmosphere and it's clear what needs to be done. There's very little confusing iconography or hard to interpret sprites, everything is clear.
They're probably the best examples in the history of the medium of great design. Capcom and Nintendo are still making 2D Megaman/Mario games with the old graphic design and there are new retro FPS games coming out every year. SuperHot actually looks worse than Doom in most aspects other than the resolution and particles.
Sierra/LucasArts games, while beautifully drawn, suffered from unclear walking paths, confusing verbs, frustratingly slow interactivity, and nonsense puzzles. From an industrial design perspective, they were a mess.
Out of this World and Prince of Persia are probably the most prominent example of games that excelled in the two dimensions of graphics and usability, while Myst is probably the most extreme example of form over function in games that were successful.
I strongly agree with most of your post (I think Out of this World and Prince of Persia both look and play well even today) but I think you're overstating the visuals of DOOM vs SuperHot. If you look for clips of DOOM (so as to bypass the rose tinted glasses of the mind's eye) and compare it to SuperHot, DOOM looks worse in every aspect except maybe that it's more colorful. DOOM is pixelated, has worse looking environments, and overall looks way worse
-- though of course it looked great to me when it was released! SuperHot looks great in an abstracted, decolorized sort of way.
The only people I've heard describe more than a handful of old games as "beautiful" have been those old enough to have experienced them before newer games came along. The original article doesn't seem to have examples of what the author considers beautiful, but let's talk about Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, a Lucasarts game from 1992 (since this is one I played in the early 90s). The art is ... fine. It has a lot of constraints (low resolution, not a ton of colors available in its palette) and it's well executed within those constraints, but it's not beautiful. I also played Myst around the same time. I didn't then, and still don't, see any way in which the 2d pixel art was "more beautiful."
The cross-genre comparisons to shooters are also unfair. Compare something like Madden 95 on SNES to Madden 64 on N64. They both have jagged edges and visual crudity; the "pixel art" nature of the former does it no favors.
Don't know why your comment is in gray, but I think you are 100% correct. "Beautiful" in games is inherently relative to the context. Space Quest 1 was so damn gorgeous compared to what I've seen before it, I still love it to this day in all its 4-color glory. Does it look beautiful to random strangers who don't know what CGA was? Heck, no.
Beauty is always relative to the context, even outside videogames. That's why I disagree with the parent post you're replying to. Indy and the Fate of Atlantis is beautiful to me. Space Quest also is.
The other day I saw a comment on YouTube mentioning that the EGA (16 color) version of The Curse of Monkey Island looks better than the VGA (256 color) version, and I agree! Beauty to me is mastery of the art form within its limitations. The limitations often make better art (the quintessential example to me is how the original Star Wars looks better, for example in its minimalistic depiction of a barren Tatooine, than the remixes or the prequels; once George Lucas was free of technical and budget limitations, his "boundless" imagination turned out to be disappointing).
I even think some games look better in pixelated monochrome glory. Is it because I am an old fart? Maybe. But I'm not wrong, either.
> Gamers would have to accept jagged edges, tearing textures, and a generalized visual crudity in 3D games for quite some time to come. A freeze-frame visual comparison with the games the industry had been making immediately before the 3D revolution did the new ones no favors: the games coming out of studios like Sierra and LucasArts had become genuinely beautiful by the early 1990s, thanks to those companies’ rooms full of dedicated pixel artists. It would take a considerable amount of time before 3D games would look anywhere near this nice