Light-Colored Empty Backgrounds

“Blank” backgrounds in video games are almost always black, perhaps because so many early games took place in space. But I came across this screenshot today and started trying to think of other examples of games with solid white backgrounds.

Cops and Robbers

Aldo’s Adventure

I think the color of this game’s background is one of its defining features.

aldo

The Life of D. Duck

This one is borderline and may not belong in this list, because obviously if a game is intended to look like sketches on paper it will have a light background.

Rez

Stage 5 in Rez is another good example, I think, and it’s emphasized with the way the scenes start out in full color.

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I think this could maybe overwhelm the topic, so maybe just a couple of representative examples will suffice, but with its monochrome LCD screen, the original Game Boy produced a lot of “light-colored” empty backgrounds. I’m pretty sure darker backgrounds were much more the exception.

Super Mario Land

Castlevania: The Adventure

Gargoyle’s Quest

Donkey Kong 94

I’m curious about how much the more common black backgrounds for other early games is due to the display hardware being itself black/dark gray when blank. I admit a lack of technical knowledge.

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that’d definitely be the case for vector games at least, like asteroids etc

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game and watch screens? but i especially like how the occasional coloured decal background graphics make the blank space look blanker. i remember owning a tiny donkey kong one which seemed to have the palm trees just printed on the screen.

the yellow background in girl’s garden is meant to represent a field, but coupled with the transparent sprites i always read it as just a comforting yellow void that the objects are projected on, maybe because it reminds me of game and watch too.

in unity you can just assign any colour you want to “empty void space” in the camera settings. there are probably a lot of games playing with that but it’s something i’m trying to do a lot in my current game project as kind of a callback to the above examples. the yellow colour in the scene is just endless abyss.

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This is a new game by Amon26 (who made “All of Our Friends Are Dead” and “Au Sable”) called WilliU. It has light-colored backgrounds and I recommend trying it out. (It’s currently 51 cents on itch.io.)

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I am in love with the look of

Hunt the Wumpus, for TI-99/4A Texas Instruments (1980)

huntwps

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Yeah, and it’s actually a pretty clever way to break up a grid into a less regular graph!


Noiz2sa - Kenta Cho, 2002
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TI-99/4A Texas Instruments games are always black and white in my mind because my sister used a black and white TV as her monitor. I think this might have something to do with how blown my mind was when I first saw Super Mario Bros., which happened to be running on a colour TV.

Donald Duck’s Playground

ddp

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I found a new game like this. It’s a good game, too.

Palace of Woe

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