I don't agree with that! Early personal computers also had pixel art, and it was mind-blowing what was done with it.

Watch this talk from Mark Ferrari, for example:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMcJ1Jvtef0

http://www.effectgames.com/demos/worlds/

Check out what he did with color cycling in this demo: it's amazing. I recommend looking at "May - Jungle Waterfall - Rain" to see how amazing this is.

That's not a gif, it's a single image, just rotating the colors. That was to deal with storage constraints. Can you imagine?

The techniques of early PC and applications are worth saving, too.

The art shown in that tweet is amazing, too, but it's not the same thing! It's an entirely different thing, with entirely different constraints.

Those are all 640x480 though. In general a lot of the early computer style starts to blur the line from true "pixel art" into "low bit depth graphics".

I agree, it's in the uncanny valley of pixel art: Too high resolution for actual pixel art and too low for high res. To me it would look better if the resolution was doubled or halved.

If you were making pixel art at like 4k definition this would look much better than what "pixel art" means today where the granularity is not at the pixel level but every block is at least 5 pixels wide to look "pixely" enough at large resolutions. The devs who do that are completely clueless.

How so? I think that the ratio of "pixels" to the displays pixels needs to change given the resolution of the final display device. What shouldn't be happening is the viewport scaling -- instead the viewport should change its size to match the display device and upscale/downscale (without smoothing) along an integer multiple to achieve the desired effect