Long time ago, art was always a tangible entity, made of materials, touchable, created through tireless effort and passion. Then computers came around. No big change to art really occurred in the beginning, but we were introduced to the concept of the pixel. A single block of on a projected screen with(at the time) limited color capability.
The kids of the 70-80s era played with these new video games with focus on the game play and not always so much on the art. But in reality, even if resolutions were low and color capability was little to none, a sort of style was created from limitation.
Consider ASCII art, composed of predefined characters, with a large enough space you could create a vista, portrait or any type of image. Sure there were limits, but consider the best of art is self limiting.
Of course breaking limits became a focus of the computers evolution. Even though they were originally designed for writing and data storage, computer games began to steer the evolution of systems. Memory, audio, visual and input became a factor. The consumer was always amazed at each new generation of game that worked upon the evolution of computers.
Yet for a long time pixel art was the norm. Some works were done in vector, defining points to create lines and ultimately images. Asteroids being the most memorable, and later on flight simulations and their likes.
Consoles highly depended on pixel artwork to evolve, Nintendo and Sega both assisted their developers with newer systems with more colors and memory, allowing more elaborate works do be done. In the early 90s, pixel art had become far more mature than its Atari days. Even the first generations of first person shooters relied on pixel art as they rendered their environments.
Polygons were around for awhile, but largely unused. Their abilities in the early days did no catch up to pixel art's quality until much more recently. We began to see the return of inferior or ugly looking games do to limitations in polygons. It was really a slow climb back to quality after that. While 3d was...3d, it still did not have the developed style that pixel art had. Characters were now blockly and spiky, color usage was low, gradient usage was high and levels and areas seemed vacant and bland.
Another big issue, in my opinion at least, was game areas got too large. Were in the past you may of found yourself crammed in a hall way, or even having to go from one block to another(Metroid), now you found yourself walking into concert sized living rooms, hallways you could drive a truck through and in general, no real scale between objects.
Of course I could be critical of pixel based art's past, but its a different story there. When polygon based 3d engines started popping up, focus was put on the fact that it was 3d, not that it looked any good. There were games that did manage to use 3d when it was young and weak, but the best quality 3d game of the mid to late 90s didn't always hold a torch to either pre-rendered(which is unfair to compare) and pixel based artwork.
There were some exceptions, some were able to meld a polygon system and sprite system to create a decent harmony of the two. Two older games used vectors to create smooth animated characters and impressive cut scenes for its time, Flashback and Out of this World. While they made use of solid colors and no shading, the visuals were impressive and the animation was smooth.
However memory was always an issue, but polygons required complex calculations, demanding more of CPUs, so video cards have become a mandatory aspect of game playing. Complex games tend to suck up CPU with basic unseen routines, take the Sims games, lots of stuff goes on in them, now throw in 3d graphics and you've killed your pc.
A third system was also devised, in the late 90s we had a game called Outcast(never played it sadly..) which used a new style of creating 3d, voxel. A 3d pixel cube which allowed the artist to create, in a sense, a more organic look. Some flight sims used it for height maps as well. Ken Silverman, creator of Duke3d's base engine, the Build engine, started to work on a voxel engine around or before 2000 was coming about. Unfortunately theres been no big takers in the industry, now that polygon based engines have near movie quality looks.
Its unfortunate because of the power that a voxel system has over polygons. If we ever see more of voxel based engines, we can look forward to a resurrection of pixel art, in a 3d form without the sacrifices and excessive reprocessing that current 3d polygon engines have today.
Personally I'd like to see, and have been interested by the big industries renewed interest in voxel visuals, Id software seems to be coming up with something using it, but I do like the classic look of old games. Realism can sometimes make a game hard to play. In real life, most things tend to blend together, picking out people in a 3d fps from the background is sometimes impossible. Another downfall is games start looking the same, improvements become less noticeable.
So in conclusion, we may keep seeing all styles stay in existence. Pixels will always be part of screens, until we devise a newer systems. And like classic music, movies and other stuff of old, what people enjoy tends to stick. Mozart made his music centuries ago, but people in this day still love it. Likewise people love Tetris, a game that looks good in near any form and most likely will survive the test of time as well.
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