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Oh, believe me, I very much know, and your elitism is hilariously cringe. "I coded in mode 13h, you ignorant plebes wouldn't understand what good graphics are."
Going to ignore your technobabble (though the screenshots are fun), because it's irrelevant if there were no actual games being produced looking like that. Thanks for at least moving on to some examples, which (of course) look nothing like the first half of your post. I'll give you Defender of the Crown (though you picked a static screenshot - the action screenshots don't look that good), which does outclass anything Sierra had until KQ4. Falcon and A-10 Tank Killer? Meh. As for Lucasfilm/Lucasarts, I agree wholeheartedly. They were also a company that was pushing graphics standards in games - I did mention Monkey Island, after all, and I sadly missed out on Indiana Jones and Loom. Of course, when Sierra caught up, it also produced absolutely gorgeous games like Gabriel Knight and King's Quest VI.
So I'm genuinely putting some effort in here, trying to parse through your tech snobbery and find some interpretation that matches the reality I experienced. I think your point is that the games industry as a whole wasn't using graphics hardware to its absolute fullest in the same way that the demoscene would (a few years later). And I can agree with that! It's pretty amazing what you can get old tech to do with modern knowledge (and no need to attach it to a playable game); hell, there are C64 demos that blow my mind.
It doesn't change that Sierra was at the forefront of graphics in the games industry, and you're absolutely wrong that it's because the artists were stupid and lazy. Tools didn't exist, market pressures did. Art, design, and playability (and being able to support what you sneeringly called "the lowest common denominator") mattered more than raw graphics (this was the era when the underpowered NES was dominant, after all). Sorry, but if you were there in the 1980s you wouldn't have upended the industry with your brilliance, any more than you would have been a king in the 1300s. It was a different world and you're not smarter than everybody who was living in it. Even if you did code in assembly (gasp)!
I'm not nearly as versed in the technical side as you, but my impression from reading this blog is that you're sort of both right? It's just that the 1980s were such a rapid time for PC tech development that it really depends on which particular year you look at. At the very start, in 1980, Sierra made a splash simply by having graphics at all, when there weren't a lot of computer games for sale on the Apple II, and the few that existed were either text adventures (still limited even in how much text they could have) or something like a port of breakout with very limited graphics. You could do better with arcade cabinets or video game consoles, of course, but those were specialized machines, not a general purpose PC. In that world, the graphics of [early Sierra]](https://www.filfre.net/2011/10/the-wizard-and-the-princess-part-1/) really stood out, and it took some skilled hacking from Ken Williams to make it work.
But then Sierra turned into a real company, with pressure to steadily release new games, so they stopped trying to push the edge in graphics and just churned out varients of more or less the same game, using their tried and true EGA-based engine that the made for the first King's Quest in 1984. Which looked nice enough when it first came out, but quickly aged, so their main claim was being easy enough to work with that non-hackers could make games, and they could sell to a wide audience.
But then at some point that formula stopped working, and they had to really double down again on graphics with their VGA games in the early 90s. Which weren't exactly a huge technical breakthough- the tech already existed to support it, and would have been even better on the Amiga- but they did a great job of just hiring skilled artists to make the pixel art look amazing, even if it wasn't super high tech. So then they got a new lease on life as a company making relatively simple, easy, family-friendly games which looked gorgeous but were also easy to run on less expensive computers.
Would you agree with that summary of the timeline?
A good summary (and de-escalation), thanks, and it does fit with a lot of what I recall (except for the family-friendly part - they released some mature games, too). Progress really was crazy for a time, with companies leapfrogging each other left and right. I guess what really started this argument was when I said that "Sierra was one of the companies pushing graphical standards in games, from EGA to VGA to FMV cutscenes", which I should probably walk back a bit, because @SkoomaDentist is technically correct that they weren't the first to release VGA or FMV adventure games. But they released some of the best-looking ones of these eras (some of the standouts I remember include KQ1, KQ4, SQ4, Willy Beamish, Gabriel Knight, KQ6, and Phantasmagoria). Their artists were anything but incompetent.
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