Comment by sumtechguy
4 years ago
More than likely it was one dude working by himself and he did not have the tools/ability to make good artwork. A lot of DOS shareware games have that problem. The gameplay might be interesting but the art is merely ok to fairly bad.
At that time you may have a copy of turboc/watcomc but not a watcom tablet and a copy of paintshop. Also pixel art is a particular artistic skill most people do not have. So you were reduced to poking data into some terrible shareware editor with an awful color palate . I made my own spacewar style game at one point. I was reduced to putting bytes into a file to get the gradients right on the hulls of the ship. Oh and each gradient is stealing a color from my limited palate of 240 colors (16 were reserved, for whatever reason at the time). You want higher res you are now talking VGA. But the trade off was resolution for color. So you could have 640x480 but only 16 colors. Or you could have 320x240 but 256 but a blocky mess. This was when a VGA card might have 1MB of memory total (usually less, unless you paid for something fancy). Throw in page flipping (which you really really want) and you are out of room on the card.
Scorched Earth was more about how many crazy weapons you could make and throw at each other with fun generated effects.
We can now look back at the whole catalog and see what was really good at the time. With collections like eXoDOS. You will find a good 95% of the games are very poor if compared to what you can get today. If you bought something like this on steam today you would be thinking what is up with this junk. Back in the 90s though it was a fun bit of software.
I would say this is it: inexperienced indie developers taking UI inspiration from the software of the day (various audio trackers / windows 1.0) and then copying each other.
AAA games like Lemmings and Wolfenstein 3D were not entirely that way, even if they still used some of the same UI paradigms (think: the hardware detection screen when starting wolf3d, or the action selection in Lemmings)
Also bashing out art is a skill one part learned one part natural. There are lots of little things you can do to make good artwork. There are many tutorials out on YT, which someone in the 90s would have had no access to. Studios could hire 3-4 artists to get everything to look nice. A guy bashing out some software in his bedroom could not hire anyone even if he wanted to. If you are doing it by yourself and you have not had the exp doing it, it will come out very meh. So the budding new artist (by necessity) will copy what they see not understanding the 'why' something looks the way it does. In this case it looks like he resorted to procedurally generated effects and items. Which makes for fun code and compact data (also important at that time).