Video Game History Casebook

Musings on the ethics of shooting screens

Ever since I first held my print copy of HG101 Presents: The Guide to Classic Graphic Adventures in my hands, one tiny anachronism keeps bugging me about its cover. It uses an old CRT monitor as it should, but the screenshot of King's Quest that's 'shopped onto it looks as it would be displayed in DOSBox or ScummVM (with default settings). Instead of filling out the entire screen, it leaves huge black borders at the top and bottom. That is not the way the game was meant to be viewed, but it's the way we nowadays play those old games with our modern monitors, where every pixel is always as high as it is wide. At least it is this way whenever we play old games the "pure" way, without additional scaling and filters applied, when pixels are as blocky as they should be. Or shouldn't they?

It hasn't always been like this, in fact. The age of pixel-perfect screenshots only really came upon us with the widespread of emulators around the 2000s, and cleaner printing in magazines. In the very beginning, long before even AV-capturing was available, creating screenshots used to be an art; not for skillfull photographing techniques or the timing to get just the right frame. No, the best-looking "screenshots" were literally drawn by artists, often with greater-than-life proportions and situations that could have never appeared like that in the game. In times of limited magazine space and the laborous process of having to hand-draw each screens, as much action as possible was often squeezed into these images. The philosophy behind this is best exemplified in this reader letter to the late Bill "The Game Doctor" Kunkel in Electronic Games March 1983:

Q: Back in your second issue, on the last page, there was an advertisement for Midway games. Notice on the Pac-Man screen that the gobbler's on the apple but he's only got'460 points - not nearly enough to reach the apple rack. How did they do it? (Grey Oliver, Austin, TX)

A: Most of the playfields seen in magazines and advertisements, Grey, are not photographs but artist's reproductions of what you actually see on the monitor. There are several reasons for this, most prominent being that videogame screens are quite difficult to photograph clearly (as enyone who has ever tried to record a high score can testify). Even the best pictures tend to feature considerable distortion as the glass tube is slightly domed, producing a "bubble" effect.

Also, artistic renderings of playfields allow a single picture to tell a more complete story than any single frame of actual game play. Seldom do all of a game's most picturesque objects appear on screen simultaneously, but in a drawing, the potential player gets a better look at all the contest's elements.

Especially (but certainly not exclusively) in advertisements, this often led to some creative liberties taken with the game, showing off bigger sprites and more colorful effects than the machine could ever display. Compare the above "screenshot" of Donkey Kong from Video Games with these other two out of the books Video Invaders (left) and Invasion of the Space Invaders. The latter's open discontent for the game on particular seems to be represented in the way Mario is shown:

Obviously, this method had to go away with the rising complexity of games' visuals, although a magazine full of skilled artists' representation instead of actual screenshots would be definitely interesting.

But let's get back to the initial issue: Nowadays the blocky pixel-perfect image has become a weird anachronist ideal in retro gaming, despite the fact that the actual designs were neither displayed, nor conceived in this way. Taking the risk of overusing this comparison, have a look at the abstract concept for the way Pac-Man was supposed to look in the minds of the player, how he actually would have looked on an arcade TV screen in the 1980s, and how most players experience him now via emulation in MAME (left to right).

The most common idealization in today's reception of classic games is the problem of aspect ratio. Many old computer systems used resolutions that seem exotic now. Most Japanese 8- and 16-bit home consoles use something ranging from 256x224 to 256x240, but even the most common resolution for IBM-PC DOS games was 320x200, which amounts to a ratio of 8:5. However, standard definition televisions and monitors before the HD and wide screen era ran at a 4:3 ratio, which means those dimensions don't quite match with what would be seen on screen. Nowadays resolutions, like 320x240 and its multiples, are designed to fit that ratio, back then SDTVs and monitors scaled the image appropriately to the proper proportion by adjusting the shape of the pixels, making them slightly oblong. Take for example this villain from Might and Magic 5:

He used to have a much larger and more impressive build when meeting him in 1994. It's the other way around with NES and SNES games, where the pixels are actually wider than high. That's why NES screenshots for example look slightly skinnier than they would appear on a television - they're supposed to be about 20% wider. Back in the era of SD television, console games in Europe ended up compressed in a similar way, due to the PAL video standard having a higher vertical resolution than NTSC. While simply unavoidable with 2D-games, not properly converting the resolution turned to an important point of critique in the 32-to-64-bit era. But nowadays, everyone seems to take all these characters suffering from dwarfism and anorexia at face value. The pixel count, it seems, has become more important than the overall impression. Imagine people looking at famous paintings distorted in this way. Compare the original La Gioconda by da Vinci (left) with the typical VGA (center) and SNES (right) pixel ratio:

What do we make of extreme cases like Ganbare Goemon: Kuru nara Koi! Ayashige Ikka no Kuroi Kage on the PSX, which can be seen in its "correct" resolution below. Where does one draw the line for pixel count over aspect ratio?

Another infamous issue is dithering, the tendency of old screens to produce a blurry image, abused by many games to make them look like they have a greater color palette or even transparency effects. Even back in the day, this could easily be spotted on a big enough screen, but from a far enough distance and a bad RF signal, a game like Ristar may have looked closer to what's seen on the left, as opposed how we show it at Hardcore Gaming 101 on the right:

Let's take a look at Ninja Gaiden II on the NES for an example of all the things that can go wrong when documenting it with the modern methods. What's immediately off-putting in a random pixel-perfect screenshot taken from the game in an emulator is the fact that only one of the two ninja shadows Ryu can have following him is visible in any given frame, while only the shuriken thrown by the invisible one is on display. The very next frame explains the mess:

In the good old days, sprite flickering wasn't simply a glitch. Inventive programmers often used it willingly to simulate transparency. On a bad old CRT TV, the shadows (and shurikens) wouldn't be seen as constantly phasing in and out of the picture, but as one always visible, if unsteady, shape. A perfect emulator screenshot in this case produces a very wrong image of the scene. Actually the impression would be more like this:

Of course there are still problems left, as the elements from the second screen are always one frame of animation ahead of the first, which becomes a real problem when one of the permanently visible elements moves in between, but there's really no way around this. Also, NES games, while displayed in 256x240 resolution, were always made under the assumption that about the upper and lower 8 lines would be cut-off on a standard NTSC screen (left). Then we would also need a 4:3 screen ratio (right).

But we're still not done: Many emulators actually allow options for scanlines, resulting from the digital-to-analog conversion for contemporary TV sets. Of course none of these options really look like the real deal, and usually turn out completely wrong when resizing to the thumbnail size of 320x. If you've got a really old TV, its frame may also cut off the corners, like in this mockup:

All this not only affects emulation, but official ports have to deal with the same problems. Castlevania: Symphony of the Night for example has seen three significant variations: the original PlayStation release, the Saturn port, and the PSP port, as part of the Dracula X Chronicles package. The PlayStation version looks very skinny, because it runs in the PlayStation's low resolution mode. The System can output several resolutions - right here it's 256x240 (though it doesn't take up the whole display so it's more like 256x208), but it can run in 320x240, 512x240, and even 640x240. Some 3D games use the higher resolutions, and sometimes games even switch between resolutions, like title screens for example. Even Symphony of the Night runs its "prologue text" screen at a higher resolution. The idea is that since you can fit more pixels on the screen, the overall image has more detail, at the cost of processing speed. Anyway, 256x240 is the lowest the system will allow. This is similar to the NES, SNES and PC Engine, which run at 256x240 or 256x224.

Things get dicey when we get to the Saturn version. The problem here is that the Saturn doesn't support 256x240 - the lowest resolution it allows for is 320x240. So how do you fit a 256x240 image in a 320x240 resolution? Keep in mind that pixels, when rendered internally, are square - you cannot simply make them oblong like the analog TV signal does. Your options are (A) pillarbox the screen with black borders on both side edges, (B) reprogram the game to take advantage of the extra space, or (C) stretch the image to make it fit the whole horizontal screen. The Saturn versions opts to stretch the image, and as you can see below, it looks terrible. You can easily pick out the pixel distortion pretty much everywhere, since some vertical lines are doubled, and others aren't. Granted, it doesn't look quite this bad on a television since the fuzzy display blurs things a bit, but it still looks visibly worse than the PlayStation release. (Note that the dialogue window is also dithered in the Saturn version, rather than truly transparent, a feature the Saturn couldn't do as easily as the PlayStation.)

In the PSP version, there are two display sizes to chose from. We're going with the smaller one, since that one is closest to the original resolution. Due to the portable screen, the PSP can only run in one resolution: 480x272. By this point, most developers were confident that gamers knew the difference between standard 4:3 and widescreen, and would accept that games originally designed for a standard def TV would look awful when fully stretched to the PSP resolution. (Didn't stop them from screwing up Valkyrie Profile or Final Fantasy Tactics, but that's a different issue.) So, pillar/letterboxing is generally seen as acceptable. However, it still doesn't run in 256x240 like the PlayStation original - instead, it's stretched to the same 320x240 resolution as the Saturn version. The difference is that the picture is filtered, something the Saturn couldn't do natively and counted on the TV to take care of. This technique blurs the whole screen slightly but obscures the pixel distortion seen in the Saturn version. This was probably done to keep the proper ratio as you'd see on the TV, at the expense of image quality. (The PC Engine Dracula X emulation in the package runs at 296x224, which is somewhere in between the 4:3 ratio and the original 256x224 resolution, so it's neither correct nor does it look particularly sharp.) The original PlayStation version of Symphony of the Night is also available for the PSP (not pictured). As with all PSX games running on the PSP, you can either run the game at it's original resolution, stretch to the full screen or maintain the (per-pixel) aspect ratio. Either of the latter two options is filtered.

There's one more problem when it comes to preview material and beta versions, which are important to see what changes a game's visual presentation underwent prior to its release. The early screenshot of Infograme's Mission Impossible for the N64 below, for example, shows a very different on-screen-display interface, aside from character models and environments unseen in the final game. Obviously, we can't take our own screenshots (unless the versions got leaked) so we're often stuck with either a low-quality old magazine shot (left) or a watermark-tainted shot from a shitty irrelevant website (right).

Well, since in this case I'm lucky enough to have both, I won't put up with any of that nonsense, and instead go on restoring the best possible variant (that I can achieve with my limited skills). It may not look perfect (but it can get close when done by someone who actually knows her stuff with image editing), but turns out far more satisfying than any of the two separate options.

Screenshots for more recent consoles in general bring another issue, as the emulators still haven't gotten (and maybe never will get) the effects quite right. Staying with the N64, besides the typical hardware blur, the fog in emulators also looks much different compared to a real system, and on some bigger textures one can see the seams in between tiles. But grabbing screenshots from the original hardware with capture cards isn't the ultimate solution, either. People who cared at all about image quality would connect their consoles with RGB cables, whereas most regular capture cards rely on blurry AV output with waving lines. Every capture device also produces somewhat different colors depending on its settings. The joke about NTSC as the abbreviation for "Never the same color" didn't come from nothing.

There are further profound reasons to keep screenshots pixel-perfect: It makes sure the image as it is produced by the software is preserved, while all post-processing boils down to applying arbitrary means of modification. Most importantly: Those cannot be undone on a bitmap image, whereas it's easy to simulate them approximately later using a pixel-perfect screenshot as the source image. But it can prove a dangerous practice: Half of the internet assumes by now that Capcom's CPS games were displayed in widescreen, while everyone who has seen them in an actual arcade knows the system was made to be used in generic cabinets, which would have a standard 4:3 TV format. It makes a world of difference:

With thumbnails one can do a lot to give an accurate representation in the article, while linking to the raw screenshots themselves. But there are also cases where no one can really agree upon how a game has to look. As this comparison shows, people have many differing opinions on the coloring of Game Boy games. Few emulators are 100% accurate with their color palettes (and then there's the issue of TV settings) but with something technologically as different from your standard true color display as the Game Boy, it's a lost case. The original Game Boy could only produce four shades of a green-ish tone, but not only are there slight spaces in between pixels, the shading isn't completely stable, either - viewing in close range, one can make out slight gradients that grow lighter towards the lower border. It also comes with a built-in analog contrast control:

When trying to translate the colors to a digital emulator screenshot, the end result always looks more dense and claustrophobic, as the pixels aren't allowed to "breathe" as they do on the Game Boy's LCD screen:

The many different hardware variants don't make it any easier to decide for one single representation. The Super Game Boy, a peripheral for the SNES that allowed to play Game Boy games on the TV screen, while choosing between many different preset palettes. Some games even had special extended palettes just for the Super Game Boy, which allowed to color certain zones on the screen differently. The additional colors were mostly used for status displays, title screens and other static elements. And not to forget the custom borders many titles came with to fill the screen while keeping the original resolution for the actual game. (This post from another blog and its follow-ups contain a more detailed run-down of the Super Game Boy's peculiarities.)

In 1996 followed the Game Boy Pocket, which used a metallic grey palette instead of the classic green, and even the separate colors for sprites and background elements that some emulators allow for aren't completely invalid, as the Game Boy Advance would display the classic games this way, once again with the possibility to change the colors used.

The seemingly simple question of selecting "good" screenshots also often bothers me - usually just take hundreds of screenshots randomly while playing (unless there's something specific I want to show), and then select those I deem the most interesting. But do those really represent the game properly when I have 20 interesting screenshots and 300 boring ones? Let's assume you write a regular column of game introductions, and you get 3 screenshots to chose for each. My impulse for a game with three different levels would be to get a screenshot from each to show the most variety. But that approach would also make it impossible to do the game with 30 different stages justice. When 90% of the time in an RPG is spent wandering around bleak environments and dull dungeons, can I "rightfully" show 50% battle scenes?

There are so many possible ways to represent (old) games in screenshots. Every site or magazine has its own policies to deal with these issues, Hardcore Gaming 101 sure has its own. In the end there is no single true way, and it all boils down to individual preference. The purpose of this column therefore is not to prescribe any arbitrary standard, but merely to remind ourselves that what can be seen now in emulators and screenshots doesn't necessarily have to look the same as it was designed, or even as it was consumed by a majority of players back in its time.