Kontextmaschine

31st August 2018

Post reblogged from Underworld USA with 14,727 notes

Fun fact: a huge chunk of our notion of retro punk aesthetic is based on a specific technical limitation of one particular computer graphics card.
In a nutshell, back in the early 1980s, the first widely available graphics card to support colour display was the IBM Color Graphics Adapter, which would later lend its name to the CGA video standard. Though in theory it supported sixteen simultaneous colours, doing so at an acceptable resolution required complex coding tricks that wouldn’t necessarily work on all platforms. In practice, the most you could count on was four colors - and what’s more, it had to be four specific colours. You had your choice of black/green/red/yellow, black/blue/red/white, or black/cyan/magenta/white. The black slot could sometimes be swapped out for a limited range of other colours, but the other three slots were fixed.
All three palattes saw use for various purposes, but for gaming in particular, the green/red/yellow palette was generally regarded as too garish, and the blue/red/white as too flat, so the cyan/magenta/white palette won out by default - and that’s how we ended up with a generation of games that look like this:
Does that palette look familiar? It should - we slap it on basically everything that’s meant to evoke a retro 1980s aesthetic. But 80s fashion never actually looked like that: it’s literally just a technical limitation of one specific video card that’s become enshrined in our vision of the decade because a whole generation of video games was written for it.