alt Hacker NewsNote that classical pixel art was not necessary particularly fat/blocky. Since SVGA become common, games like SimCity 2000 or Transport Tycoon Deluxe run in 640x480 on 14" CRT, which is ~60 DPI. Later (in second half of 1990s), higher resolution became common, but also higher screen sizes, so DPI was in 70-80 range. That is not really that different from full HD on 24" LCD (~92 DPI), which dominated later era.
Now I’m wondering what were some of the last generation of games to dominantly use fully hand-drawn pixel art. After 1995 or so, games using isometric art such as Red Alert (1996) and Fallout (1997) were more and more switching to sprites and environments rasterized from 3D models and hand-tweaked at most, as desktop 3D modeling became more affordable and SVGA resolutions meant less need to hand-fix aliasing artifacts.