Legendary game/hardware designer Gunpei Yokoi on the topic of how black and white (or 4-shade monochrome, etc) is fine, which is true:
This interview with Nintendo legend Gunpei Yokoi and Yukihito Morikawa sees Yokoi opining about modern games while showing a desire to return to his toy roots.
shmuplations.com
Yokoi: Do these playworlds really need to be that photorealistic, I wonder? I actually consider it more of a minus if the graphics are too realistic. There’s a similar line of thinking in the entertainment world—using soft focus lenses when women are filmed, for instance. When that is done, each person can project their own conception of “beautiful” onto the woman being filmed, and everyone will see their own personal Venus.
If things are too realistic, there’s no room for your imagination, and the reality of those faces you thought were beautiful will be revealed. Or to use another common expression, it’s actually more erotic when a woman leaves some skin covered. Even if a video game doesn’t have the power to display very complex graphics, I believe your imagination has the power to transform that perhaps-unrecognizable sprite called a “rocket” into an amazing, powerful, “real” rocket.
Morikawa: We must not steal from players the ability to add their own imagination to what they see. As designers, we show them the dotted lines where they’re supposed to cut, but we must leave it to the player to do the cutting. If we take that away then there’s no room for imagination. Unfortunately the trend today does just that. There’s too much fanservice and catering to the player, doing everything for them. RPGs are especially bad about this: they’re like those all-in-one vacations people take, where every last detail is neatly tied up and taken care of for you. They set you on one linear path and there’s no room for your imagination to roam.
Yokoi: Television has gone from black and white to color, and now that we’re seeing high-definition tv it’s almost too detailed. You get that problem I mentioned, of seeing wrinkles of beautiful faces. Since television is mainly a medium for information, I think it’s better for it to be more clear, but games don’t require that. I think the world of a game feels larger when you can use your own imagination.
Designing the Game Boy
Morikawa: Hearing you say that, I feel like I understand a little better why you chose to make the Game Boy monochrome. And it wasn’t a technological problem that made you choose a monochrome screen, right?
Yokoi: The technology was there to do color. But I wanted us to do black and white anyway. If you draw two circles on a blackboard, and say “that’s a snowman”, everyone who sees it will sense the white color of the snow, and everyone will intuitively recognize it’s a snowman. That’s because we live in a world of information, and when you see that drawing of the snowman, the mind knows this color has to be white. I became confident of this after I tried playing some Famicom games on a black and white TV. Once you start playing the game, the colors aren’t important. You get drawn, mentally, into the world of the game.
Morikawa: That’s a very bold decision. It reminds me of the first Macintoshes with monochrome screens.
Yokoi: Actually, it was difficult to get Nintendo to understand. Partly, I used my status in the company to push them into it. (laughs)
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