“Sooner or later, everything old is new again,” Stephen King wrote somewhere or other at some point. It’s an observation that certainly applies to video games, where genres and styles fall out of vogue only to make a triumphant return a few years later. Pixel art, the theme of this issue, is now a popular and widely respected art form. Low-poly models, once a feature of the PSone era, are now fashionable again. The roguelike, a genre almost as old as gaming, is pretty much ubiquitous.
So what will the next trend be? My prediction: digitised graphics. A trend that arose in the late nineties, when developers were striving for a bit more realism than you got with hand-drawn sprites, digitised images appeared in such games as Lethal Enforcers, Pit-Fighter,…
