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Snes palettes

Printed From: Pixel Joint
Category: The Lounge
Forum Name: Resources and Support
Forum Discription: Help your fellow pixel artists out with links to good tutorials, other forums, software, fonts, etc. Bugs and support issues should go here as well.
URL: https://pixeljoint.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=26771
Printed Date: 11 September 2025 at 6:30pm


Topic: Snes palettes
Posted By: Kyrieru
Subject: Snes palettes
Date Posted: 11 November 2019 at 6:12am
Something I've been wondering about Snes games; I know that based on specs, the snes doesn't really have a palette. However, it seems like a lot of snes games end up with a lot of similarities regardless.

What do you think caused the similarities? Were a large number of artists using default palettes in common software at the time? Or, was it perhaps that certain colors appeared better than others on a CRT?

There's just some really baffling color choices in some snes games, and it makes me wonder how they settled on them. I'd say that modern "pixel art color theory" is fairly commonly understood nowadays, and easy to identify alongside a snes game, so it makes me wonder how much of it was a difference in background, inspiration, culture, software, etc.


Replies:
Posted By: eishiya
Date Posted: 11 November 2019 at 5:31pm
Although the actual colour selection was large, the majority of artwork still had to use small palettes and there could only be so many palettes used by the game due to RAM limitations. Add in colour theory considerations (particularly the need for adequate contrast) and similarities in subjects and gameplay that needed to be depicted, and you end up with artists having to solve the same problems within the same limitations.

Another big factor is that it's a small world! A lot of those games had their art done by the same artists or by artists inspired by their peers, it's only natural they'd make similar decisions.

Most of the wilder-looking games probably came to be the same way they do these days - made by artists who don't know how to solve problems better or just don't care to, or want to do something weird for the sake of standing out. Some of it may also be down to unusual hardware used for testing, or even errors in programming and data entry.


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