If you’ve never heard the expression that ‘black and white was only possible once colour was invented’, well, you have now. What does it mean, though? Well, when it comes to photography and films, black and white was, initially, just the way things were. Once colour film, both for stills and moving pictures, was created, black and white became an option; a stylistic choice, rather than one enforced purely due to the limitations of the medium.
Why is this relevant when it comes to video games? Well, games created with pixels used to be the norm; generally the only way to create games. Creating games that used sprites and pixel backgrounds wasn’t a choice, but a necessity. Once 3D games became more widespread, and, in the mid-90s during the era of the PlayStation, Saturn and other consoles, when it was the norm, creating a game that utilised 2D pixel art was quite often a stylistic choice, just as it will often be when using black and white film, when colour is available.
Critics and players alike often felt that pixel art felt old-fashioned and passé back then, and it took consoles such as Nintendo’s mighty, 32-bit Game Boy Advance (or, as it’s widely known the GBA) to turn its fortunes around. Fans and journalists alike suddenly realised that there was a beauty in well drawn pixel art, regardless of the rapid advances in 3D technology that were occurring on the home consoles, computers and in arcades.
It’s this glorious era of pixel art that The GBA Pixel Book, the latest coffee table volume from Bitmap Books, celebrates. First published in German, Bitmap Books have collaborated with the original publisher, Elektrospieler, to bring this gorgeous tome to English fans.
It’s a beautiful book, featuring pixel art from over 240 Game Boy Advance titles, such as Advance Wars, Fire Emblem, The Legend of Zelda: Four Swords, Sword of Mana, numerous Final Fantasy titles and many more, alongside articles that take a deep dive into the GBA’s library. Almost 4,000 screenshots are featured in the book’s 300 pages, with pixel art cut outs, sprites, maps and montages presenting the pixel art wonderfully.
Grouping games by genre, the book takes a close look at one of the consoles that kept the art form of pixel art alive; though it fell out of favour on more powerful, then contemporary hardware, the GBA was a sort of custodian for this style of video game art, and kept it going until the baton was passed to a new generation of indie game designers, who keep this style going to this very day, co-existing with multi-million dollar, ray-traced extravaganzas from the big publishers. However, even the big publishers are known to dip their toes back into 2D, pixel-art based games every now and then too, such as UbiSoft’s stunning, 2D UbiArt titles.
The GBA Pixel Book is available to pre-order directly from Bitmap Books; you can get your copy secured right here. Due for release on the 11th November, 2024, it’s a book that no retro gaming fan will want to miss out on; it brilliantly, extensively documents one of the most influential, yet often unsung, eras in video game history.
