In 2024, ‘Low Poly’ Graphics Were Everywhere
From music, to beauty to art - low poly was inescapable.
This year, Doja Cat surprised a lot of her fans with a deep cut. Most of them had never heard of Conkers Bad Fur Day, a Nintendo 64 cult classic video game. For those that had, they’d likely forgotten Sunflower, an NPC that has just 15 seconds of screen time throughout the entire game. Those 15 seconds clearly had an impact on Doja Cat, inspiring her Sunflower costume on Halloween. She was remarkably faithful to the original low poly design of Conker’s Bad Fur Day, with the blocky bees and all.
While Doja Cat’s reference was niche, her use of low poly aesthetics reflected a mainstay cultural trend in 2024.
Low poly is a 3D modeling technique that uses a small number of polygons to create a model with few faces and vertices. The Nintendo64 and PlayStation1 were famous for these graphic styles, birthing iconic characters like Lara Croft of Tomb Raider, Snake from Metal Gear Solid and, iconically, PS1 Hagrid.
Originally, the look of these games wasn’t an “aesthetic” choice, but rather a consequence of technological limitations at the time. Most games today are far more graphically advanced. But with the proliferation of low graphic games like Roblox and surging nostalgia resurrecting days gone by, low poly aesthetics broke away from the 64-bit box in 2024, showing up across social media filters, beauty trends and artworks.
Social Media Filters
Earlier this year saw the rise in popularity of the “PS2 Filter.” It felt like a natural progression from the collective NPC obsession of 2023 where people reenacted the clunky scripts and contorted shapes of niche video game characters. The PS2 Filter was our final NPC form. We became the characters we so jubilantly mimicked. Everyone sought a low poly makeover, with the likes of Nirvana and Olivia Rodrigo transforming their album covers into PlayStation game covers. These filters are representative of a larger “cultural mod” trend in video games, where musicians use game aesthetics for album covers, memes and more.
Beauty Trends
In the world of Roblox, avatars aren’t technically low poly. But their lower graphic quality when compared to the standard of today’s Triple A video games results in a similar sense of nostalgia. Throughout 2024, beauty and fashion influencers who had clocked countless hours on Dress To Impress sought to replicate the style and makeup of their runway avatars. Creating the cylindrical faces typical to the game took a lot of skill. Many creative breakthroughs were made, with different artists pulling stockings over their heads to emulate the longer faces of the avatars.
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Artworks
Beyond games, many artists embraced the low poly aesthetic in their respective disciplines. Artists like Jack McVeigh and OZBREN took to the free 3D software, Blender, to create a series of rendered low poly scenes and scenarios masquerading as real life.
The artist FersetiD practiced low poly machinima, an art form that uses video game graphics to create cinema. Over the duration of the year they recreated scenes from Spirited Away, Whiplash, Akira and Fight Club, transforming classics into polygonal planes.
Artist Gao Hang had his own unique approach. He is attracted to the certain rawness, oddity and awkwardness that low poly provides. But instead of rendering these in a digital environment, Hang paints them, providing a new level of artisanal value to a bygone era of image rendering.
From social media to beauty art, why did low poly become so popular in 2024? Perhaps artists were rallying against the swathes of photo realistic images produced through significant advancements in AI image generation in 2023. With anatomically abstract form and endearing charm, low poly provides a beautiful paradox. Amongst something inherently fake, many found something very real.
James Davis is a Strategy Director working across gaming and fashion. Get in touch at james@drawndistant.com or through LinkedIn.