Flappy Bird: A note about 8-bit sprites

February 9, 2014 at 6:08 pm | Posted in Video Games | 5 Comments
Tags: 8-bit graphics, Cheep Cheep, Dong Nguyen, Flappy Bird, NES, Nintendo, pixel art

All other things aside, as someone who has had to create both 8-bit and 16-bit sprites… When I read captions like these: “look how similar these are, this is ripped art” alongside images like this:

I feel the need to point out that 8-bit graphics with such severe palette and size limitations will all end up looking pretty similar. As the image below says, Flappy Bird and a Cheep Cheep look no more similar than a Cheep Cheep and a vast array of NES sprites pulled from multiple different NES games from multiple different companies.

The same can be said about pipes with such graphical limitations (friends of mine who had to create faux 3D metal in the NES era and before will all attest to this). It saddens me that death threats and other cruel forms of vitriol are being slung over something like this.