Are all these graphics pixel art? Which of them are and if not why is that? Because i have had an argument about hell squad & PGA european tour not beeing pixel art.

waxworks


PGA european tour


elvira


hell-squad


hell-squad

PGA image throws a 403 error.

Hell-Squad has some stuff that was blurred/drawn softly and downsampled, like surt said.
All of these also have a lot of noise that would probably not be welcomed in the modern day.

Something to keep in mind with older art is most of it was made before pixel art was a thing. This is just digital drawing/painting with palettes limited by the technology, the artists did not set out to make "pixel art". Some PA techniques, like dithering, developed quickly. Other PA concepts, like neutralising colours, cluster control, the distinction between noise and texture, etc would only really develop/spread later.

These artists weren't trying to make pixel art because it didn't exist as an end goal at the time. The difference between Elvira and Hell-squad is that Elvira's artists were going for a style that helped them maximise the appeal and readability of their art despite the colour limitations, while Hell-Squad seemed to be going for the look of photos that were subject to those same limitations. Both succeeded at these goals.


tl;dr: They're pixel art, but they're early pixel art from before "pixel art" was distinct from "digital painting" and had some of the distinguishing features it has today.
It would not be fair to hold these examples to the same standards as modern pixel art, because those standards weren't there when they were made.

The Hell Squad screens look like a collage of pixel art elements and digitally manipulated elements. So I'd say no, not strictly pixel art.

Elvira and Waxworks I would class as pixel art looking at those two shots, but there's no guarantee with old games like this that they weren't hand painted, scanned and retouched.

I checked out the AGA and OCS/ECS versions of PGA European Tour on Lemon Amiga and again, it's a hard one to call. The in game graphics are a mix of scaled sprites and 3D graphics. The portraits look like pixel art but could be digitised photos that have been cleaned up. The trees are very noisy visually, they could have been scanned from photographs.

It's worth noting that a lot of games from this era would use any technique possible to get recognisable graphics on screen. You'd see lots of scans of paintings with very little retouch work done or digitised photos and film footage sitting right next to digitally painted graphics and actual pixel art all in the same game.

Also publishers releasing games for systems with higher on screen colour counts (SNES, VGA PC, Mac, AGA Amiga) would frequently produce the graphics for those platforms first and then use automated processes to reduce the colour depth for machines with lower on screen colour count (Mega Drive, Atari ST, OCS/ECS Amiga).