Deluxe Paint

A flexible, rather powerful, easy-to-use VGA painting program from Electronic Arts, with a distinct and easily identifiable dithering pattern. It originated on the Amiga, and on that platform went through several major revisions and lasted quite a while. On the PC, the only release to make a huge impact is Deluxe Paint II Enhanced. That release, though, is pretty significant. For a while it seemed that every major commercial and shareware PC game used Deluxe Paint for its visuals. Famously, the Monkey Island protagonist Guybrush Threepwood was named after the Deluxe Paint brush file that stored his character sprite.

Using Deluxe paint it was easy to edit pixel by pixel, and the gradient effects were sort of the Photoshop wizardry of their way: pick a starting color, pick an ending color, set a dithering pattern, and pour. Bingo, a clean transition between the two colors. As with Photoshop, the effects are easy to spot and easy to abuse. And it is so very tempting to abuse them.