Did people think nes games looked realistic in the 80s?

Of course not. I just wanted to shoot the ducks so that fucking dog wouldn't laugh at me.

I doubt that people thought graphics were realistic. They probably didn't think that games would get as good-looking as they have, though.

Watching technology and gaming advance has been crazy, and all in such a short time.

Of course they didn’t.

Herrrr derrr Egyptians must be bad at architecture cause it was a long time ago 🤣

I'm unsure of NES games, but I specifically remember PS2 stuff looking really realistic as a kid. It's like your brain fills in the gaps and all that.

I was around in the 1980s, but I honestly wouldn't have noticed.

I remember skyrim when it first came out and it looked amazing. Now I look back at the graphics and it was still more impressive than oblivion

In all retrospect the NES was using what it was capable of back then so it didn't really look that realistic as people claimed it was.

Though if you take a look when the PlayStation and the original XBOX era ( also counting the Wii era ) those were the eras when games looked more realistic because those revolutionized the way people play games.

Well there is the argument that, although those old CRT TVs had a lower resolution than modern 4K HD TVs, old 8 and 16 bit games actually looked better on them. And so that's the reason those games look incredibly basic graphics-wise nowadays, and why people are often surprised to see how bad they look since they remember them looking better. Those old TVs helped blur the pixels of the sprites together, which created softer edges and colour gradients than how they look on modern TVs. That helped your brain interprete it as being more detailed than it actually was, there's no way it could convince itself that there's any hidden detail in between the definite boundaries of the such clear-cut pixels nowadays. Here's a good link I found that demonstrates the differences of retro games on old and modern TVs:

https://imgur.com/gallery/oLHQ7Qq

i was there and i said this is better than the atari 2600 but everyone knew there was better stuff comin

and there was better then (still a joke by todays standard) but who wanted to pay 5 grand for a game system?

I wasnt alive in the 80s but the games I played as a child in the early 2000s had horrible graphics (some of them were from the early 90s at least) and at the time I definietely thought they had great graphics. It was all I knew though.

People knew that games would eventually be indistinguishable from reality, but used different standards to judge graphics of the time.

No, they weren’t impressed by how lifelike a pixelated 2D Mario looked.

I was born 10 years after so I have no idea what people thought at the time, but I doubt they thought very cartoonish graphics were lifelike. However, it probably still seemed pretty technologically advanced. My parents told me that the kind of fuzzy, grainy quality of TV picture from back in the '70s/'80s seemed like it couldn't get any better. At present, it's hard for me to imagine better quality than the high definition picture we have now (and I thought the same of the old CRT TVs, and still have a nearly 30-year-old RCA that I think actually has good picture especially for the age, though it's definitely different from my Smart TV).