Whenever I say there’s something special about video game graphics during the NES/Master System era, some will believe that it’s simply due to nostalgia, while others will agree with me, but won’t be able to explain why. Sometimes those who agree with me will even chalk it up to nostalgia themselves. I however believe that there are concrete reasons as to why the level of graphics that the 8-bit systems achieved for home consoles holds such significance, and I’d like to discuss one of them here. I’m going to be using mainly NES graphics and not Master System ones, because 1) the NES was more popular and 2) the Master System actually had better graphics overall, and we want to look at the less-good.

From left to right: Berzerk, Robot from Berzerk, Circus

From left to right: Mario, Megaman, Karnov

What is the significant feature that the characters below all have in common that the characters above do not, aside from obvious graphical quality improvements?

Answer: They have faces.

This makes it easier to identify with them as characters, and gives them a sense of personality. In the NES era, the graphics were strong enough on the popular consoles to portray characters’ faces and to give them facial expressions, even if it’s the same expression all the time. This is important because we as humans tend to see ourselves in our surroundings. Scott McCloud talks about this a good deal in Understanding Comics, but it really is something fundamental. Two dots and and a line becomes a face. A semi-circle shape can be a smile or a frown depending on which way it’s facing. It allows players to identify with the characters.

While this does not take into account those games which feature primarily vehicles or objects inanimate objects, my focus is not so much on them, as I believe they have a somewhat similar appeal, only focused on their fantastical realism rather than their human quality.

Even those characters who practically had no eyes, noses, or mouths still benefited from the 8-bit graphical quality, as it allowed the games to clearly delineate an area of the body as the head.

From left to right: Simon Belmont, Bill Rizer, Ryu Hayabusa

This was especially useful in portraying characters with more human proportions as opposed to the big-headed cartoonish sprites from before, as it allowed the characters to seem realistic on the NES while again still giving them some sense of personality.

That is not to say that faces on sprites were a wholly unique experience to the 8-bit era. The NES and the Master System were not the first consoles to regularly portray characters with faces, with that honor probably going to the Colecovision in 1982. However, the difference here is a matter of timing, as 1983 was also the year of the North American Video Game Crash, and so in the minds of most people, graphics went from Atari to Nintendo, and if you look at the graphics of that era, they more often than not could barely differentiate a head from a neck, with one notable exception being Pitfall for the Atari 2600. Hey, it’s not all art and discovery.

The 8-Bit NES era was when graphics were good enough so that almost anyone who made a game for the console could give a sprite a face (and in essence, a personality), and thanks to good timing also was when video games were again popular enough to be a common feature in households. Graphics were certainly not the only factor in endearing the NES (and to a lesser extent the Master System) to young gamers, but as humans are visual creatures, graphics played a significant role in implanting the memories of these games into their minds.