Color grading Memes

Game developers circa 2008 really woke up and chose violence by slapping a yellow-brown filter on literally everything. Gears of War? Brown. Fallout 3? Sepia wasteland. Every military shooter? Desert storm, but make it jaundice. The industry collectively decided that "gritty realism" meant making every texture look like it was rendered through a dirty truck stop bathroom window. Someone in a boardroom probably said "make it grittier" and the art director just cranked the yellow slider to 11. Now we've swung to the opposite extreme with HDR and ray tracing making everything look like a Skittles commercial. Sometimes you just want that nostalgic dehydrated aesthetic, you know?