I mean, I was there... but I'm not saying that they looked better overall at the time. Our game TV all the way up to like 2000 was fuzzy as fuck, and certainly from at least the early 80's. An LCD is an improvement from that. But so was my $100 college TV from BestBuy.

But the pixel artists of the day really were optimizing around the geometry and physics of TV pixels, and I do think it looks smoother when viewed on a nicely-calibrated CRT than on a similarly-calibrated LCD. Again, this isn't about nostalgia. The artists had high-end CRTs on their desks when they were making the games.

You also get into stuff like the Nintendo Zapper not working on LCDs because of the way it depends on CRT scanlines.