What are we actually looking at? A rock? An enemy? Does it even matter compared to the glory of running? Horizon Zero Dawn at the resolution of 128 pixels wide and 72 pixels high? Yes, a YouTuber managed to play Horizon Zero Dawn at 72p, and it’s not a typo.
The YouTuber in question is Kryzzp, who also runs zWORMz Gaming, and he made the game in this absurd resolution to test the performance of an Nvidia GT 710, an ultra-budget video card, which cost barely $ 40 brand new in 2016 . Incredibly, he manages to repel one of the robot enemies, though it is impossible to tell how much ammunition he still had after doing so.
To put the 128×72 resolution in context, it is actually less than a modern color graphics computer like the TI-84 Plus CE, whose 320×240 screen has many more pixels. You can imagine that the game looks like this on a Game Boy Advance, but you’ll still miss the point: that portable 2001 has a screen resolution of 240×160. However, the older graphics calculators TI-8E had a resolution of 96 x 64.
While watching someone struggle to play a game according to a resolution that would have been considered bad 10 years ago, it can be funny, but it’s also interesting: what other games can you play like that? There’s probably a bit of fun in posting ultra-low resolution screenshots on the internet and getting people to guess which game they’re watching. ‘Is it? car theft or Force? I can actually just make out a car. ‘
I think it’s safe to say that it’s almost walking around to be aesthetically pleasing again. It’s like watching a game from an alternative reality where graphic Amiga style has remained in vogue forever, even after the switch to 3D. It’s beautiful in its own way.
If you want to try to manage it yourself, you will need low-power hardware, as the resolutions are available depending on the graphics card you have. My ThinkPad’s integrated Intel HD 620 graphics are technically more powerful than the Nvidia GT 710, so the lowest resolution I could play the game with was 160×100 (after adjusting the scale resolution in the game to 50 percent). Not that I could actually run, as the mission asked me to – I could not read the button prompt on the screen.
