Did drawing sprites on the NES take a lot of creativity?

[Gors]

I can't seem to connect the thread's title question to the actual matter in said thread.

this isn't a lot of 'creativity', but rather a miscalculation of the placement of the sprites. If you measure the gap's height, you'll notice it's 8 pixels tall, which is each tile's heightxwidth. Pixelart in games are often drawn with tiles, and arranged in gameplay on the go. This makes easier fot the hardware to form images, as it can recycle graphics and thus economize valious space in the cartridge (for example, in Super Mario World, Mario's head tile is recycled through the whole walking animation; this is because of the fact the head doesn't need to change when he walks).

The problem with that is this makes hard for the programmers to accurately calculate every tile's position and which tiles to appear; these mistakes appear in this example you posted. Other examples would include the weird line of weird characters/graphics on the side of the screen on some games (principally when the screen scrolls), trouble of the hardware to render so much tiles (Megaman games), and in irl gaming, graphical distortion when you accidentally bump the cartidge.

Now, if you talk about CREATIVITY in NES sprites, then I can say people needed to be extremely creative when coming into making a visually pleasant game with so few resources. Back in the day, there were no easy methods to draw pixelart, like Graphics Gale or even MS Paint. Actually drawing them required programming skills, and every sprite they inserted on the cartridge would have to be in use someway (or it would simply waste space in the cartridge).

Super Mario Bros, for example, needed a LOT of planning before actually having graphics drawn for it. Shigeru Miyamoto made a bunch of paper 'sprites' so he could see how the sprite would look like in the NES, and he'd insert said sprite if the drawing was good. Here's some of several sketches that the dev team whipped up (some, if not all, were made by Shigeru Miyamoto himself):




The same was done with the older game Donkey Kong:




So, creating each graphic, one by one, was indeed difficult, forcing spriters to 'sprite' in paper first, as it was the easiest way to test them.

Also, such restriction also resulted in witty problem solvings.



the castles in the start and the end of the game uses the same tiles, recycling a huge amount of data. You can also notice that the bushes and clouds are the same sprite, only colored diferently.

So, I can rightfully say that making sprites for the NES (or any old console) took a shitton of creativity, because it didn't only need creativity on the actual designs, but they also had to be creative to make it fit within the hardware context.

You can learn a lot more in this Iwata Asks, http://us.wii.com/iwata_asks/mario25th/vol5_page1.jsp . It is an interview with the original SMB's developers and what they did to make the game.