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.

p.s. Timestamps, if you just want to skip ahead to the Results (11m42s) and Conclusion (18m10s).