We're Not Made for 8K

Nintendo is remaking Ocarina of Time. It’s out on the 5th of November, and I’ve watched the trailer more times than a grown man with a mortgage should admit to. It’s gorgeous. Full of atmosphere, beautifully animated, the mechanics look spot on. Proper craft.

And yet. Something in me goes “hmm”.

The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, the new trailer for Nintendo Switch 2.

Now, I’m fully aware this might just be nostalgia talking. When I was a kid there was the Nintendo 64, a handful of polygons and textures so blurry you couldn’t tell grass from soup. Link’s face was basically a triangle with ambitions. And we loved it. We filled in the gaps ourselves, because the machine left us gaps to fill.

The Great Deku Tree on the Nintendo 64, 1998. A tree, a door, some fog. Job done.

The same tree in 2026. Every leaf accounted for. Every single one.

It wasn’t just games. Illustration, animation, all of it had less detail back then, and somehow more soul. The limits of the technology forced everyone to be expressive within those limits. You couldn’t hide behind fidelity, so you had to actually have an idea. Which makes me wonder what 4K and PlayStation 5 graphics do to the imagination of a kid today, when every blade of grass arrives pre-rendered and there’s nothing left to make up.

Your fans are on full blast

I heard a young Gen-Z guy on a podcast recently (I’ll find out which one, I promise) say something that stuck with me. He grew up with technology his whole life, and his whole life he felt like everything on his phone wanted something from him. His opinion. His outrage. His take on politics and the big important things. And all he actually wanted, he said, was a friend. A room of his own when he went off to study. A small, grounded life.

Oof.

I think we’ve opened the floodgates to way more input than a human brain can handle. It’s like your laptop running hot with the fans blowing non-stop, whirring away, never quite catching up. And here’s where I might go a bit far: I genuinely suspect the endless push for more visual detail has something to do with why so many people feel anxious. Can I prove it? Absolutely not. Am I willing to say it on my own blog anyway? Clearly.

The animators knew

Have a look at this video essay by Every Frame a Painting about Satoshi Kon, the man behind Perfect Blue and Paprika. Kon said he never wanted to direct live action because his editing was too fast for it. Some of his shots are a single frame long. A moment that needs ten frames in live action, he’d do in six. Why? Because as an animator he could draw less into the shot, so your eye could read it faster.

Satoshi Kon: Editing Space & Time, by Every Frame a Painting.

He took detail away. Clear shapes, clear colours, an image you get in one frame. That’s what makes a fast edit actually work, and it’s the exact opposite of what every new console is selling you.

Same question with The Lion King. Why do the hand-drawn lions from 1994, animated by Disney at the absolute top of their game, have so much more expression than the photoreal remake? Why, when I look at a PS5 game where everything is razor sharp from the pebble at your feet to the mountain on the horizon, does it all look flat and samey to me? Ugly, even. (Sorry. Not sorry.)

Ask any decent painter and they’ll tell you it’s about negative space. You put the detail where it counts, on the face, in the eyes, and the rest can sit in shadow, or be one flat colour, or barely be there at all. The empty bits are what make the detailed bits sing.

“But Tom, nature has loads of detail”

I can hear you already. “Tom, nature has way more detail than any 4K telly.” And sure, if you zoom right in. Molecules, cells, the way light bounces off a dewdrop, all of it. Nobody’s arguing with a dewdrop.

But nobody walks around with a microscope glued to their eye either. Look at a mountain. Look at a beach, or a handful of pebbles. There’s always a balance to it. There’s the golden ratio, Fibonacci, that spiral turning up in galaxies and ferns and the way leaves arrange themselves around a stem. And there’s always emptiness. A big flat stretch of sand, one blue sky, so the eye lands on the one thing that’s beautiful. The sun throws a blanket of shadow over half the valley so one slope can glow.

Same spiral, every scale. Nature has been doing composition for a while.

Now look at this. Horizon. Aloy standing on a hill, admiring a valley where every tree is exactly as sharp as every other tree, near and far, copied and pasted until the whole valley looks like wallpaper. I’m sorry, but this was made by someone who hasn’t been outside in a while. A real forest is mostly dark. You find your way through it by the bits where the light gets in.

Horizon. Everything in focus, all the time, forever.

And then there’s the shrimp

Lastly, let’s talk about those AI food menus that are suddenly in every takeaway window. You know the ones. I can spot them from across the street now. Every grain of rice lit like it’s on a red carpet, every shrimp charred in exactly the same spot, and over the whole thing this weird grid of detail your eye just can’t settle on. It freaks me out. I’d go as far as calling it a small crime against humanity, and it’s spreading.

Twenty-five dollars for a texture map.

And look, I’m hardly one to talk. I work with AI every single day. But I’ll tell you a secret: most of my time with it is spent taking detail out. Calming it down. Finding the one thing in the frame that matters and telling everything else to shush.

So what am I actually saying?

I’m not telling you to go back to minimalism. We’ve done that. Sitting in a white room with one chair and a houseplant isn’t the answer either.

It’s about being considerate. Being precious about one line. Paying attention, putting some soul in it. Learning to draw. Learning the difference between how Western and Eastern art treat empty space. Daring to pick a different colour than the one the software suggested.

Because here’s what I keep seeing: young creators making AI videos, getting paid for them, and the videos look seriously impressive. But it reminds me of kids at the circus holding huge lions on chains. Sure, the lion roars. It does a trick now and then. Very impressive, everyone claps. But the kid holding the chain has zero control. They’re just hoping the lion feels like cooperating today.

The only way to actually wrangle that lion is to learn the skills of an art director, an illustrator, a painter, a composer, a writer. That’s the whip and the chair. Learn those.

The machines, the consoles, the AI, all of it will keep shoving more stuff down your throat in 8K resolution. And we’re just not made for that. We’re made for simple things. Wood, water, nature, a bit of earth under your feet, a hand on your shoulder.

So learn the craft. And then have the nerve to leave things out.

Right. I’m off to play the N64 version. Blurry textures and all.