I'm currently working on a hypothesis that an early stage in the development of virtual materiality in video games was the manipulation of surface in 1980s platformers. As an experiment, I've made color palettes from screenshots of the first six (out of seven) levels of the first Sonic the Hedgehog game, to see if color choice alone is enough to guess the materials the level is supposed to appear to be made up of. I'm not sure my hypothesis is on solid ground yet, but I think the illustration is quite thought-provoking. Color really is a powerful tool.