Why do older generations games have a common look and feel by console?
I’ve been getting into retro gaming in the last few years (the options for emulators are just so cheap and good) and I’ve noticed more and more that there is a common “look and feel” to games released on the same console in older generations. With SNES games, for example, I saw a screenshot of Indiana Jones Greatest Adventures and instinctively recognized it as an SNES game before reading anything about it. I’ve noticed this is also true of games for Genesis, NES, N64, and PS1. These sorts of visual distinctions seem to disappear around the sixth generation.
Is there a particular reason for this? Did developer kits back in the day steer people toward certain styles or did the fact that you targeted hardware more in older development result in the similarities or was it something else?
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