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Gloomy colours for gloomy times.

so much merry?

I am a horse, what is this?

If my memory serves me right then "Liquid Wen" may have been the breakthrough demo to use color / grayscale on the big stage.

Not all monochrome is gloomy.
All monochrome is 1920s retro.

any color scheme just adds +1 matrix multiplication to a vector.

It is simpler to visualize a gradient with more than 1 domain (of color).
there is an art form in the constrain of a monochrome gradient.

Not only modern.
Just a few famous demos from 90s for your pleasure. The screenshots may look colourful, but in fact demos are almost greyscale.










I love them all :)

fix: not always "greyscale", but monochrome.

Also, to answer the question: Because nowadays people have grown up and they have a better sense of aesthetics.

In case you weren't trolling with this, I pose a counterquestion: why do you code for crappy DOS platforms when you could write code for the latest GPU and multicore systems?

That's an interesting question; I'll try to paint the rough strokes of the reasons behind this trend.

Simply said, the reason is performance.

The Moore's law doesn't apply anymore and the maximum frequency of GPU has been plateauing for at least ten years. The typical number of cores of a consumer PC has increased since, but not nearly at the same pace. Moreover, parallel programming is notably more difficult, and the gain it can provide is limited (see Amdahl's law).

If you look at graphic cards, each year there are new models with increased brand numbering (580, 680, 780, 980, 1080...) but the feature they provide has stayed fairly similar, and the main difference is the number of cores. Again, more parallelism but with the same problems.

So one way to gain performance is simply to reduce the number of colors. In theory, making a black and white image could be as much as three times less work than making an RGB one. So of course it's very tempting to choose a B/W design and profit from this 3 fold performance improvement.

I hope my answers helps clarify things. If it doesn't, please also read this article.

"maximum frequency of GPU" -> I meant CPU, obviously.

noby: You might want to add this

True story. Nothing says "grown up" like a feeling of higher personal status based on color palette preferences in demoscene productions. ;)

Both approaches have their place. I certainly won't say no to more Hercules demos!

coders finally realized they cannotinto color. :V

I object to that and fully caninto color. :^

I cantoointo colour if I want to

Because using color is difficult. Harmony, balance... boy, those artists study this for years before they master it.

Going greyscale is saver since it's more difficult to fuck up with dissonant color combinations. The other approach is to go all the way to the other extreme and be unapologetically rainbow, ignore color and call that a style.

But of course you can also risk and go try color, but you better be good at it, because the demoscene has matured and demands good visuals (which is good) and will let you know if they are disappointed. So since most people want to play save, you get what you described -lots of gray demos. Of course some artists who do have a sense of color might still choose to go black and white, but does the minority and is not what you are talking about I think/

Or do both: grayscale AND rainbows: rgb distort effect with glow :)

hooray VHS tape fx! /o\

Just code for the C64 which has a pre-selected palette of colors that go nicely together and cannot be changed.