When Video Games were Brown.

Everybody knows that video games went  through a phase of desaturated brown, yellow filters, and bloom.

It is an unassailable fact, for which the  evidence is everywhere. The unrelentingly bleak palettes of games like Gears of  War, Call of Duty, and Assassin's Creed.

The urine-tinged highlights of Need  for Speed: Most Wanted and Fallout 3. The trend was so pervasive it even infected  The Legend of Zelda. The beautifully bright colours of Wind Waker were lost, replaced  with the drab hues of Twilight Princess.

The most erudite video essayist adjusts their  glasses, and starts to read from a script: 'It all started with Resident Evil 4'.

But wait - hold on a minute. Did it? Did  video games really go brown for a while, or are we just cherry picking  examples to fit the conclusion?

The discourse surrounding video games  can be quite dogmatic. Certain things are accepted as truth without any real basis.

Now, I'm not trying to tell you that there  were no brown video games during Gen 7. I'm just pointing out that brown was not a novel  invention. There were brown games before.

Quake was famously brown. All the World War  2 games of the early 2000s had drab colours. So my question is, was there any measurable  change? Is there some kind of objective measure we could chart, so that we might  witness the trend with cold, hard data?

For instance, could we do a colour analysis over  a significant portion of video games history? Now I know what you're thinking. We're  talking decades - thousands of games, each with hours if not  hundreds of hours of gameplay.

How would you analyse all that? It's impossible! So anyway, here's how I did it. The first decision was the scope of  the analysis: Which years to cover.

Our key interest is Gen 7, so I wanted  to centre on 2005-2013. But I also wanted a period surrounding this era so  we could observe broader trends.

2000 to 2020 seemed reasonable to  me, so that's what I went with. Game selection was trickier. I wanted a sample set that was representative  of gaming in each respective year. Analysing *every* game is impractical - and even if  we could, we'd need to weight by importance.