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Suddenly Blonde: Difference between revisions
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{{trope}}
So ''This Game Is Totally Awesome'' comes out on your [[Nintendo Entertainment System|NES]]. And it lives up to its name. [[Crowning Moment of Funny|You laughed]]. [[Tear Jerker|You cried]]. You fight the legions of hell and rescue the [[
Four years later, it finally arrives - ''[[Super Title 64 Advance|Super]] This Game Is Totally Awesome'' is released. And it's even better. The [[Techno Babble]] is more babbley, the [[Slippy
Wrong. She was always supposed to be blonde. However, the NES couldn't render blonde hair very well (it was hard to distinguish from skin tone, and they could only have three colors per sprite, making yellow "less useful"), so most artists switched to brown. Likewise, it was impossible to render ''black'' hair, because black was generally reserved as the background color.
As consoles became more advanced, some franchise characters kept their quirks as a legacy feature. However, most artists opted to revert to the original concept art. These characters became Suddenly Blonde. This trope refers to any example of a technical limitation that requires a character in-game to differ from their concept art, which is reverted when that limitation is removed. It doesn't just refer to hair color.
{{examples}}
== Played Straight ==
* Pretty much any character with "[[Everything's Better
** Also, every princess of Hyrule is named Zelda. There's no reason they should all have the same hair color.
** Link himself suffered from this trope in ''[[A Link to The Past]]'', which is funny since his last two NES games had him with brown hair, which matched the concept art of him. The concept art of Link in Link to the Past still had him with brown/dirty blonde hair, but the in-game sprite of Link has him with ''pink'' hair, which is most likely due to palette limitations for the SNES. The GBA port of the game still retained Link's pink hair. All Zelda games after this one kept link with blonde hair afterward (although ''[[Twilight Princess]]'' dirties it up a bit.)
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*** Same with the Zelda from the first game.
* Mario and Luigi used to be [[Palette Swap|identical except in color]]. Nowadays, although the exact measurements change from game to game, [[Divergent Character Evolution|Luigi is universally the taller brother]].
* Continuing with [[Nintendo]], Pauline of ''[[Donkey Kong]]'' was a blonde in cabinet art but a redhead in the actual game. She became a brunette in the second ''[[Mario
* Almost-aversion: [[Metroid|Samus Aran]] took a few games to become fully blond — her second game was [[Game Boy|in black and white]], and in Super Metroid she had a sort of dishwater blond color. Her ''[[You Gotta Have Blue Hair|green]]'' hair from the original (after getting the Varia Suit) has yet to make a comeback.
* Old DOS games that were rendered in EGA color had only 16 colors, so most games made in that era used white, red or gray for skin tone. When VGA came out, most new games (with one exception — see below) took advantage of the new, nigh-unlimited color palette to reinvent the characters of the series. Games which provide examples of this include ''[[Duke Nukem]]'', ''[[Space Quest]]'', ''[[Leisure Suit Larry]]'' and ''[[King's Quest]]''.
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* ''[[Space Quest]]'s'' hero Roger Wilco. Brown-haired in his first three adventures, at least dirty blonde as of Space Quest IV, also looking rather bleached in both Space Quest V and the Space Quest I remake.
* The 1987 Famicom ''[[Star Wars]]'' game gave Luke Skywalker black hair except in cutscenes.
* In ''[[
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* The brothers [[Super Mario Bros.|Mario]] had appearances designed to be easy to render on the [[NES]] — the caps were to avoid having visible hair, the overalls were to make the arms more distinct, and the mustaches were to make the lack of any visible mouths less noticeable. This also had the side effect of making the characters look distinct during an era where almost every video game hero was either a cute ball-like monster or a Japanese boy with [[You Gotta Have Blue Hair|blue, spiky hair]].
* In ''[[Metroid II]]'', since they didn't have color available, the artists put large, noticeable shoulder pads on the Varia Suit to make the difference obvious. The Varia suit is now dark orange (with Samus' regular suit being yellow), but the shoulder pads have remained, and actually became notably ''bigger'' in ''[[Metroid Prime]]''.
* As mentioned above, EGA games tended to use white or red for skin tone, and ''[[
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{{reflist}}
[[Category:Video Game Tropes]]
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