Randomly Mine: Brown & Grey

Recently, I managed to get F1 2010 running on my computer for a future project, by future I mean over six months from now. Something which immediately stood out however is that period of time when games completely abandoned vibrant colors in the pursuit of... actually, what was it for? 

Grittiness?

F1 2010 is anything but gritty. It's atmospheric, mechanically polished, and blisteringly quick, yet, all its muted color palette does is make its F1's globetrotting adventure rather samey. I suspect however you've raised this exact point against many other games of this period. So, if it's so obvious to us now? Why wasn't it back then?

Why did games like Gears of War, GRID, and Burnout Revenge blow my socks off at the time graphically?

Its occurred to me that might be because prior to the 7th console generation, games rarely nailed the "gritty" aesthetic. Take war themed shooters for instance. In the span of four years we went from this...

To this...

Whether a game was a World War II FPS. A Modern Military Shooter. A Racing Game. Or even a Fighting Game. Graphics of the time necessitated blurry textures, action-figure faces, and stiff animations. In essence, back then, a game's grittiness was more judged by what it suggested rather than portrayed.

Medal of Honor Allied Assault has a flat fog ridden map for a D-Day landing with the graphical detail of a calculator. Not an ounce of blood is spilled. And apparently, only twelve men landed on the beaches rather than one-hundred and fifty six thousand. But, at the time, no other World War II game bothered to echo Saving Private Ryan's iconic opening. Just a few months earlier, Return to Castle Wolfenstein had bikini-clad villains in capes serving a Dark Lord in armor straight outta Warhammer 40k.

To even hint at something believable was compelling. I remember as a kid thinking that Gran Turismo 3 seemed lifelike. That sounds stupid today, but compare what it was a sequel to...

...it basically was.

Dreary color palettes were originally a product of assisting the technology in selling a world that's as grungy as the world literally was. Something which in the past would've seem completely silly, due to how blurry textures and characters most games were prior to HD consoles, so naturally developers would wanna mess with the new exciting thing.

But what starts in isolation can quickly become almost contagious, and dreary color-palettes have become such a joke in recent years, franchises like Gears of War have to actively fight against its own reputation.

Just fascinating that it's so vividly (heh) attached to one period of gaming, that even annually licensed sports games couldn't avoid it.