covid + isolation has broken my brain so i wanted something comforting yet totally undemanding yet vaguely productive-feeling to do at the computer for a bit. i've been compiling an archive of all the background art from LucasArts adventure games (1987-2000) and it's interesting to watch things evolve. tools got better, color palettes and resolutions got larger, and of course at the end of the 2D era the concept of "background art" faded away more or less entirely.
one thing that's very apparent from the earlier games is that every pixel was considered much more carefully - you had fewer of them to work with, sure, but more significantly tools being more primitive it was harder to place (and change your mind about!) each one, and the way you constructed a scene in a program like Deluxe Paint - shape and line drawing tools, gradient fills, the smear and smooth tools, color cycling(!) - was generally pretty different from what it feels like to sketch out and add detail to a background with non-digital media. looking at an EGA or early VGA (eg the Zak or Last Crusade FM Towns versions) background you can sometimes almost reconstruct the process the artist went through to create it in Dpaint.
Monkey Island 2 was a turning point of sorts - the first 256-colors-only production whose art pipeline leaned hard on scanning in drawings (marker and colored pencil, i believe?), with absolutely gorgeous results. from that point it seems like approaches diverged quite a bit: a game's art style determined how much its pipeline favored traditional media, early digital painting, 3D rendering or a combination of those. what's cool is that you can sometimes track the trajectories of specific artists within LucasArts getting better at their craft and trying out new techniques, and more generally see the state of the art develop. for a while this was some of the prettiest stuff you could see on a computer screen anywhere.
and if you grew up playing these, it's also just a warm bath of comfort. some of this work is still absolutely stunning. so yeah if i can scrape together a more or less complete archive of all these, i might make a bot that posts one lovely little world per day.
One of the creative liberties this approach allowed was radical distortions of scale and perspective. The illustration priorities felt more "picture-book" than they did "matte painting," and because the adaptive-scaling pixelated characters characters didn't blend at all into this soft aesthetic, more priority was placed on the feeling that you were watching a story being told than that you were 'inhabiting a world.'
