>> But if you think about it - if the screens we have today would have been available back then, what do you think would the game designers have preferred?

The best example of design-to-the-CRT by far is the original Star Wars. For starters it's a vector game - electron beam is deflected in lines to directly draw the objects. Vector monitors start with a very distinct look. Then they went further. For the enemy bullets (snowflakes or whatever you call them) they overdrive the electron gun which causes the tube voltage to drop, which in turn defocuses the beam and creates a wide-soft vector for those objects. And finally when you lose a shield (get hit) they draw a very much oversized square so far off screen that the electrons scatter off the back of the tube and flood the entire screen with a haze or fog as you take the hit. Oh, and the death star explosion also has a bit of a unique look as it involves more vectors than the hardware can quite keep up with.

That game was designed for the medium and is the pinnacle of genera. There is no substitute.

I agree that there are games that were made for CRTs. Asteroids is another great example.

However, most games do not take advantage of being displayed on a CRT.

Do you think it's better to play Donkey Kong or Galaga on a CRT vs a LCD? If so, why? Just nostalgia?

Of course the game designers would have preferred the highest-resolution display available.

Unfortunately, the hardware of the time could barely keep up with the graphics. If the hardware wasn't generating graphics on the fly (like the early Namco, Nintendo, and Midway systems), it needed a large chunk of DRAM for the framebuffer, which was even more expensive.

Some systems like the early Williams units economized by using a 4bpp buffer combined with palette hardware, but you were still taking nearly 48K of RAM, which was a sea of chips back then.

A VGA-sized buffer on this system would need 150K of RAM. That's triple the cost! HD 1280p? 10x the cost not to mention pixel clock speed, which the TTL chips of the time just couldn't do.

the game designers would have obviously preferred CRT. they were designed for a specific usecase that todays screens don't handle well, and probably never will unless a completely new tech comes along.

Also, if you have played games a lot on CRT, you will find HDR OLED not amazing at all. HDR OLED makes mistakes between were things are in memory vs the screen. so you think 'that thing didnt get me' and then it does even though it was pixel(s) away.

Mistakes? You mean it introduces delays? Or something else?

You're right, eventually modern display technology will catch up to the point where it indistinguishably simulate CRT screens :)