if the 90’s were defined by classic retro videogames with pixel and “old” graphics, then why was music and images so high quality?? for example, in 1995 radiohead released “the bends”, a cool album!! but it doesn’t sound like it was made in 1995, because in 1995 videogames were pixelated and had blurry graphics, shouldn’t it have been that way too?? if technology was that way in 1995?? why does that album sound so high quality and modern if it was made around the same time old retro games were made?? thank you!?
I’m having trouble understanding what you mean by that. Music predates computers by a long shot, you can hear Beethoven symphonies which were composed at a time where computers didn’t even exist in science fiction. Even if you’re talking about recorded music you can get Jazz records that also predate computers. So I’m not sure what exactly is there to compare here.
I guess your question is in the lines of “why doesn’t Mario soundtrack sound like Radiohead” which is a very valid question, we clearly had the technology to record and play Radiohead music, so why not during games? The answer is simple, computers just weren’t capable of it (although in the 90s that changed but let’s start from the beginning). The computers at the time were 8 bits, this means that any value you store must be between 0 and 255, this leaves you very little sound capabilities, together with this games needed to be extremely small in order for the computers of the time to be able to run them. This severe limitations led to the aesthetic and sound of classic games, they were essentially the best graphics a computer could run at that time. You can find 8-bit versions of almost any music, which will show you an idea on how that music would have sounded like in one of those games (although that’s not exactly true because of the size limitations the music would be even worse quality).
In the 90s we made the jump to 16 bits, and that allowed a lot more sounds, voices sounded a bit garbled so they were rarely used but you can find some. But in this era you start to get music that’s closer to real music in games, take for example Sonic and compare the background music with the original Mario.
Still in the 90s we made the jump to 32bits, and then audio was no longer a problem. In this time you get games showing video and full audio, and there are games whose soundtrack were actual albums.