Editing Pixel art (section)

===1980s===
[[File:Maniac Mansion.png|thumb|''[[Maniac Mansion]]'' (1987) on Commodore 64]]
In what is sometimes referred to as the golden age of video games or [[golden age of arcade video games]], the 1980s saw a period of innovation in video games, both as a new artform and a form of entertainment. During the early 1980s, video game creators were mainly programmers and not graphic designers. Technological innovation led to market pressure for more representational and "realistic" graphics in games.<ref name=":0"/> As graphics improved, it became possible to replace hand-drawn game assets with imported pictures or 3D polygons, which contributed to pixel art developing as a separate art form.

Gradually, professional artists and graphic designers had a bigger impact in the video game industry. [[Sierra Entertainment]] released [[Mystery House]], pixelled by [[Roberta Williams]], and the ''[[King's Quest]]'' series; and [[Lucasfilm Games]] released games such as ''[[Maniac Mansion]]'', ''[[Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders]]'', and ''[[Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade: The Graphic Adventure]]''. Mark J. Ferrari, an artist at Lucasfilm Games, later said:<ref name=":2">{{cite book |last=Benjaminsson |first=Klas |title=The Masters of Pixel Art volume 3 |publisher=Nicepixel Publications |year=2020 |isbn=978-91-519-3539-3 |pages=51, 140, 156, 198 |language=en}}</ref><blockquote>When I was first hired by Lucasfilm Games in 1987 to do artwork for their computer games, pixel graphics was not thought of by anyone as an 'art form'. The use of pixels was not an aesthetic choice – as it certainly is now. If anything, pixels were an unavoidable and very irksome obstacle to the creation of any 'real art' for use in the exciting but bewildering new realm of computer entertainment. There were no pixel artists then – at all! There were only traditional artists.</blockquote>[[File:Laser Squad o8 ubt.jpg|thumb|''[[Laser Squad]]'' (1988) screenshot, ZX Spectrum]]
Nevertheless, the aesthetic of 1980s video games had a major impact on contemporary and future pixel art, both in video games, the [[demoscene]] graphics and among independent artists. As computers became more affordable in the 1980s, software such as DEGAS Elite (1986) for the Atari ST, [[Deluxe Paint]] (1985) and Deluxe Paint 2 (1986) for the [[Amiga|Commodore Amiga]], and Paint Magic for the [[Commodore 64]], inspired many later pixel artists to create digital art by careful placement of pixels. In the case of the Commodore 64 and the [[Amstrad CPC]], some early pixel artists used joysticks and keyboards to pixel.<ref name=":1">{{cite book |last=Benjaminsson |first=Klas |title=The Masters of Pixel Art volume 1 |publisher=Nicepixel Publications |year=2020 |isbn=978-91-639-0485-1 |pages=7, 52, 77 |language=en}}</ref>

With the rise of the [[demoscene]] movement in Europe in the late 1980s, artists who were proficient with creating pixel art using [[8-bit computing|8-bit computers]] like the Commodore 64 and [[ZX Spectrum]] or [[16-bit computing|16-bit computers]] like the [[Atari ST]] began to publish their pixel art as demos. [[Demogroup]]s would often include coders (programmers), musicians, and graphicians, where graphicians were a common name for graphic designers and/or pixel artists. Although some graphicians worked on adding art to cracked video games ([[crack intro|cracktros]]), the demoscene contributed to artistic communities creating pixel art for its own sake as art. These were often shared via floppy disks that were handed from person to person or via the postal service.<ref>{{cite book |last=Benjaminsson |first=Klas |title=Masters of Pixel Art volume 2 |publisher=Nicepixel Publications |year=2017 |isbn=978-91-639-0486-8 |pages=56}}</ref> The golden age of the demoscene and its associated pixel art milieu, however, is often regarded as beginning in the early 1990s.<ref name=":1"/>