http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/RealIsBrown

Yahtzee "I'm sure with the benefit of hindsight we can all agree Quake wasn't exactly easy on the eye. Which was your favourite Quake level? The brown castle, the greenish brown temple, or the other brown castle? Jericho shows us exactly how far we've come with the levels being, in order: brown ruins, more brown ruins, brown castle, more brown castle, and revenge of the brown castle."

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Desaturating or heavily tinting a game a single color for the sake of realism, usually to a sepia effect (hence the trope name), but sometimes blue or pure grey.

Giving a game a narrow color palette can make it look gritty, dramatic and "realistic" and stand out from similar titles. Done well enough, a game and its color scheme will always be associated with each other. In practice, this means a world of brown, grey, and the occasional red (y'know, from the blood splatter on the camera).

A handful of 2D and early 3D games used this to make up for a limited number of onscreen colors, as they operated on limited-size color palettes, and requiring more hues to display a scene meant sacrificing subtle variations in saturation and brightness for those hues (as each variation requires a separate color in the palette). But the golden age of this trope came when consoles became powerful enough to use color grading effects, not even a decade after films began to use it themselves. With almost no examples to guide developers and an eagerness to stand out from the previous generation, it was both easy and tempting to abuse color grading.

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It was also used to cover up a limitation of lighting and shading engines - a light shines down and illuminates an object from that side, sure, but figuring out where the light goes after that and what else around it might also be illuminated (a process called interreflection) is extremely difficult for the computer to simulate, especially when it needs to do so 60 times every second. Until around the eighth generation of console games, the only solution was to use static lighting (accurate light and shadow mapping planned out in advance) and while reasonably effective, it comes at the cost of not having dynamic or interactive terrain or lighting, which in turn means no smooth day/night cycling or destructive terrain physics. Again, if everything is tinted one dull color, it's not as noticeable.

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Unfortunately, at a certain point your players will take a look outside their window and back at your game, and something will seem wrong. Why are those palm trees brownish green, even though you're supposedly on a tropical island? Brown may be realistic for some surfaces, but not for all of them, and everything is best taken in moderation, otherwise you'll end up with a game that's Deliberately Monochrome.

It's becoming increasingly common for colorful games to mockingly parody this trope, usually by including an optional "next-gen" filter, tinting the whole game brown. This combined with noticeable improvements in graphics rendering technology since the heyday of the trope could make Real Is Brown on the way to becoming an Undead Horse Trope.

This day, a memetic resurgence ensues where this trope might as well as called "Mexico is Brown" due to how American movies and media stereotypically portray Mexican or Latin American settings in brown filter.

See here for further info.

Compare Gold Is Yellow. See also Mood Lighting, Color Wash. The use of Post-Processing Video Effects makes Real even Browner. See also the sister trope Who Forgot the Lights?, which deals with a shortage of light in general. This trope is usually when Color Contrast is deliberately avoided. Usually paired with a Crapsack World for added "realism".

Now with a theme song. Resistance 3 - Fade to Brown Music Video .

NOTE: This trope does not apply to a game taking place in an environment that actually would be gray or brownish in Real Life, like a lot of deserts, or a bombed-out cityscape. Unless they're just set in a desaturated environment to make their lack of color look like a deliberate design choice.

Straight

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Video Game Examples

Action Adventure

Many parts of The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess do this when the bloom and brown come close together, particularly outside of the Snow, Zora and Forest areas. Most of the background art during the first half of the game is either gray, brown or light green with a brown filter over it; and that's before you enter the Twilight Realm, in which case, the Twilight descends over the scenery, making everything look even more brown. In an ironic twist, the homeworld of the Twilight Realm averts this trope, as it instead uses shades of purple and yellow for the sky, and grey with blue for the ground and the internal rooms of the Palace of Twilight. The HD remake is considerably brighter and less brown in many places, although certain areas such as the Twilight and Eldin areas retain similar color schemes.

Shadow of the Colossus is said to have popularized the Real Is Brown trend, seeing as it was still a breathtakingly beautiful game, aesthetically speaking, and inspired other games to go with muted colors and lots of bloom. Note that the designers were not actually going for realism, but rather, a very stylized look. The game accentuates whatever the prevailing colours are in the area you're currently traversing. For example, when the player explores places of lush green, those colours are picked for enhancement instead of the yellowy brown of the desert or the dark earth.

Assassin's Creed I plays this in a similar level. And if there's nothing to brown-ize (or whatever color seems to be supposedly prevalent in an area), the bloom gets intensified Up to Eleven.

Tomb Raider: Anniversary is noted for its greys and browns (particularly in Egypt) compared to the bright colors of the original. It makes sense considering most of the areas have been subject to hundreds if not thousands of years of weathering, dirt, and dust.

Prince of Persia (2008) seems to be this. Though it's a thematic choice; as the title character liberates the world from darkness, it becomes verdant and lush again.

I Am Alive is just one small step above complete grayscale. Fitting when one thinks of the dust of the post-apocalyptic world it takes place in covering everything.

Castlevania: Rondo of Blood was a very vivid and colorful game. Its 2.5D remake Castlevania: The Dracula X Chronicles changed the color palette to be primarily dark brown and gray as part of its aesthetic overhaul, which also replaced the cartoonish, anime-inspired character designs with more realistic ones.

Star Control I and II were both exceptionally colorful games, utilizing 256 colors to a significant extent. Colors actually play a major role in the second game, helping the player to recognize mineral-rich star systems and planets just by their colors. The third game, featuring far more advanced graphics, is decidedly grey and brown.

Tyler: Model 005 is set in an old, dilapidated house. As a result, much of the colour used is brown.

Action Game

Stubbs the Zombie has the tutorial level as full of vibrant colors, but when you start the game proper, the developers added a grainy green filter over everything, to apparently showcase what the world looks like to a zombie. As if anyone ever wanted to know.

Played with, but generally averted in Heavy Rain. The beginning of the games starts out with such bright lighting and colors that it almost makes your eyes water. After things go bad, the colors are dark, dingy brown-greens and rusty reds. However, the color later returns, and there's several bright and/or realistically subdued color schemes throughout the whole game. Including one very saturated location that looks like it was lifted right from 2001

The traditionally lavish Musou series (Dynasty Warriors, Samurai Warriors, Hyrule Warriors) takes a turn for the dirt with Legends Of Troy (Troy Musou).

Armored Core 4 is an extremely gray and brown game. It's very jarring compared to the old installments, which were vibrant, almost technicolor-y in parts. Frustratingly, the environments seem to have a bleaching effect, so that bright red mech you just made is going to look just as gray as everything else. Its sequel, 4 Answer, is still pretty brown/gray, but it improves the shading noticeably to avoid the weird, faded out ghost effect of 4. Compare 3 ◊ with 4 ◊ . Even the interface is bleached out.

with 4 . Even the interface is bleached out. The Matrix: Path of Neo has at times very heavy green tint, otherwise it's mainly grays, black and other drab colors, except for a few random pops of brightness. [1]

Final Fight: Streetwise renders its city in washed-out grays and browns, much unlike the games that preceded it (including the 3D Final Fight Revenge).

Adventure Game

Limbo of the Lost could almost be considered an unintentional parody (or is it?) of this trope; despite almost every background being plagiarised from a wide variety of sources the game still manages to be an unrelenting onslaught of brownish hues.

Sierra games in general had much more brown in their graphics after the transition from 16-color, parser-based games to 256-color, point-and-click games.

Driving Game

Need for Speed: Most Wanted (2005) paints the whole scene brown-orange every time you crank up the Visual Effects; when Carbon was created, they thankfully replaced the gritty brown with modern, cutting-edge blue. The 2012 Most Wanted completely averted this trope. Then Need for Speed: Undercover went back to brown with too much bloom. EA released a patch for Undercover that among other things moved the sun up and away from its position directly at the horizon and in the middle of your screen.

The Forza Motorsport series focuses on real-world colors and shades. Certain tracks (like the Mazda Laguna Seca) are composed entirely of brown, tan, gray, and bloom.

Split Second, by the virtue of ripping-off emulating Michael Bay movies.

emulating Michael Bay movies. GRID has a yellow tint applied over everything.

While the Mario Kart series has traditionally avoided this trope like the plague, a few of the tracks in Mario Kart 8 have a strangely subdued, low-contrast palette. This is particularly notable in the Retro tracks, when you compare both versions and notice just how much brighter the old versions are (compare Piranha Plant Slide from Mario Kart 7 to its appearance in 8, for instance). There are still plenty of courses with the familiar bright colors of past Mario Kart games, though, and the tracks are generally much better at distinguishing what amount of less saturated colors is actually realistic than some other examples on this page.

Fighting Game

First Person Shooter

General

On the Amstrad CPC, Mutan Zone, Solo and Sol Negro (which all had graphics by Carlos A. Díaz de Castro) ran in medium-resolution mode with a palette composed of brown, gray, orange and black.

Can be an Invoked Trope for any PC gamers which use a third-party hook known as "Reshade" where shaders are injected into any supported game resulting in either more brownish visuals or the opposite.

Hack And Slash

Diablo III was announced and early screenshots and interviews stated that they wanted it to have a rich color palette with natural areas with a variety of greens, oranges, and blues. Fans started a petition against this; see Aversions and Parodies below for Blizzard's response.

The human world in DmC: Devil May Cry is deliberately depicted like this in massive spades. By contrast, the parallel demon world is full of lively, flashy colors.

The world of Bloodforge has very little in the way of colour and is rather grainy and monochromatic. Most of the colour in game comes from the excessive amounts of blood pumping from the corpses of Crom's various opponents.

MMORPGs

City of Heroes averts this, but City of Villains plays it straight: the Rogue Islands tend to be muted shades of brown or grey, with the occasional patch of vibrant red. Going Rogue's Praetoria averts this as well. Buildings come in all colors in the first few zones, and even the underground and the industrial zones have a good amount of color.

Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn applies a brown filter whenever the player enters the the Sylphlands in East Shroud. The game also has a general desaturation filter applied over most of the world, which makes everything seem more washed out.

Rift suffers from this in some places, particularly the Defiant start zone.

World of Warcraft: Some zones are this, including the Eastern Plaguelands. The entire zone seems to be covered in a kind of brown fog. In general, however, the developers averted this trope on purpose, after they tried deviating from the vibrant colors of Warcraft III and it didn't take. This particular zone is a purposeful use of monchrome. The brownish haze and blighted plant life are the remnants of the plague (see the name of the zone?) that turned the population of Lordaeron into undead. The same basic issue is why Felwood looks sickly green everywhere. Any zone that's got a predominantly "evil" presence is like this. The Plaguelands (green/brown), the areas around Blackrock Mountain (red), Darkshore (Grey), Felwood (green), Duskwood (grey), Hellfire Peninsula (orange), Shadowmoon Valley (nigh-radioactive green), and most recently, Icecrown (washed-out blue). Feralas, in an aversion, is a beautiful, mostly-untouched rainforest that is almost entirely a bright, vibrant green. Players who are new to the region will be pleasantly surprised by the incredibly green environment since the two areas next to the rainforest are desert. Which are, of course, brown and red (Thousand Needles), and Gray. (Desolace) There is actually a Night Elf NPC who lampshades the sudden drastic land change.

Grimms Notes has it's battle sprites (and a few artworks) drawn with brown outlines and applied with a brownish filter, accidentaly making them look somewhat unpolished. Most affected characters are those whose color palettes are supposed to be completely white, ending up looking dirty in battle. Even the Animated Adaptation went with this trope.

Platform Game

Real Time Strategy

Heroes of Newerth has been criticized for this.

Rhythm Game

Dance Dance Revolution X uses and subverts this at the same time. A lot of its interface had gritty, urban overtones with lots of metallic, rust, brown, paint splotches, and yellow going on. Yet, somehow only about 2 of the game's "stages" also share this urban motif; much of them were futuristic looking or made out of desserts.

Role Playing Game

Shoot Em Up

1942: Joint Strike is designed to look like a World War II movie, complete with sepia tones and occasional film grain filter. And the projector winding up and down at the start and end of a level.

The Gun Frontier project games, including Metal Black, did a muted color pallete to allow pseudo-realistic sprites.

The Shoot 'em Up Battle Garegga does this for the scenery and the bullets, which can lead to many WTF-inducing deaths. The Danish, Chinese, Sega Saturn, and Rev.2016 versions have a feature that turns some of these bullets into brightly colored, easier-to-see bullets (not unlike many Bullet Hell shooters, such as the Touhou series).

Simulation Game

Sort of played in the SimCity series, where different zone types have a certain color scheme so the player can easily differentiate them with a quick glance. SimCity 3000, for example, has gray-brown buildings for poor apartments, brick red for mid-class apartments, and white with red or slate gray for rich apartments. However, the trope was played annoyingly straight in the vanilla SimCity 4, in which to make the buildings more realistic and subtle, all colors were desaturated beyond belief, resulting in incredibly ugly and grungy buildings for the poor, boring buildings for the middle class, and not so cheery colored buildings for the higher class. In response, the Rush Hour/Deluxe expansion added extra building sets with some extra color.

Steel Battalion definitely counts with regard to the outside environment, though the cockpits on 2nd-gen and especially 3rd-gen VTs have their fair share of color.

Because of the prevalence of official and user-made sand levels in MechWarrior Living Legends, the game often feels like this. Other levels, like Extremity, have Real is Purple, or Real is Muddy Green in the case of Marshes

Survival Horror

Silent Hill plays an interesting variation: true to the intensely creepy and putrid nature of these games, everything there is black, brown, red, and crimson red. There's also the distinctive graphical effects for daytime, night-time and dark world. Granted, the town's dreariness is very much intentional, and it makes the odd instance where brightly-colored objects or setpieces do appear all the more jarring.

The town in Pathologic is this most of the time. In its normal state, the town is a drab and depressing array of brownish colors (the town is in the steppes, where it's naturally dirty all of the time). However, when the disease comes, infected districts will be hit with a green filter that makes everything look sickly, which later gets swapped for a yellow filter before finally returning to normal.

Played pretty straight in Resident Evil 5. While it did set the overall mood for the game, one Russian modder was so disappointed that he wrote a graphics mod which removes the coffee filter, along with a sarcastic message insulting Capcom for what they did. Averted with Resident Evil 4, as the first third of the game is set in overcast daylight and the rest takes place at night; neither setting really makes colors "pop out", but the castle in Act 2 features plenty of tapestries and other decor in rich blue, red and purple hues.

that he wrote a graphics mod which removes the coffee filter, along with a sarcastic message insulting Capcom for what they did. Averted with Resident Evil 4, as the first third of the game is set in overcast daylight and the rest takes place at night; neither setting really makes colors "pop out", but the castle in Act 2 features plenty of tapestries and other decor in rich blue, red and purple hues. Resident Evil, despite being set in a realistic setting and using horror as the theme, was quite colorful and bright due to the Playstation being fairly new and the developers not knowing what the system could do at the time. The remake on the Gamecube shifted the color and brightness in the opposite direction by making everything dark unless there was a good light source nearby and all the colors are muted and washed out with a mix of brown and gray. Since the Gamecube was much more powerful than the Playstation, the developers were able to capture the feeling of survival horror on a realistic level. Resident Evil 4 in particular inspired a TON of later game conventions.

Third Person Shooter

Played with in darkSector. The opening movie and first level are all in washed out black and white gray tones, and just when you think the whole game is going to be like that, the next level is a rather colorful Eastern European harbor village, with the rest of the game having reasonably bright colors (there is a mild color filter, but it's nowhere near as bad as the coffee filter in GTA4 or Gears of War). Things do get darker later in the game when night falls (it's partially a horror game, after all).

Speaking of Gears of War, the game is generally given a dour filter, with everything being gray or brown. Gears 4 tried to address this with some greenery, but the game still looked like it was dunked in coffee most of the time.

Considering what Dubai looks like, one would think Spec Ops: The Line averts the trope, and indeed it does in the more intact indoors environments. However, the city is set in a desert, and six uninterrupted months of monstrously thick sandstorms more than justify it being played straight. Radioman : It's wrong to call it a storm. I've never seen a storm that could blast paint off a car. This is sand, flying through the air at 80 miles an hour.

The world of the Sega Saturn game Amok seems to consist primarily of dimly-lit brownish voxels.

Turn Based Strategy

Wide Open Sandbox

Non-video game Examples

Anime

The anime of Attack on Titan has an incredibly drab color palette. This article from Anime News Network says it best: "The world of Attack on Titan is dense and elaborate. Even after 25 episodes of the anime, we've barely cracked the surface of everything going on inside those walled cities. But to be perfectly honest, it's also easy to sum up Titan's universe in one little word: It's Brown. My god, is it Brown."

from Anime News Network says it best: In Fullmetal Alchemist and its sequel film Fullmetal Alchemist: The Conqueror of Shamballa, our side of the Gate is presented with darker and more muted colours, in contrast to Edward's world which is full of bright colors.

is presented with darker and more muted colours, in contrast to which is full of bright colors. In Sword Art Online and its spinoff AGGO, the online game of Gun Gale Online is presented as this, taking place in a post-apocalyptic landscape largely consisting of abandoned cities, deserts, and forests. The rest of the series, which takes place offline and in other online games, averts this with bright and cheerful colors. That being said, the colorful cast of characters (including even Death Gun himself) contrast heavily with the environment for artistic sense, especially LLENN who wear pink. This continued in the videogame pseudo-adaptation Fatal Bullet.

Beastars loves itself some high-brightness-low-saturation colors.

Comic Books

In general, as comics coloring processes and paper have improved, colorists have used more moody, subtle colors. The introduction of computer coloring in the 1990s (including gradients) resulted in a brief burst of bright colors and rainbow effects, before everyone settled down and started doing more moody shades. A later reprint of Jack Kirby's "Tales of Asgard" stories recolored them with modern techniques. This should have been an exciting juxtaposition of old and new artistic methods... except they made everything brown.

The Incredible Hulk was gray in his very first appearance, but bright green in the next issue, as the four-color technology of the early 60s couldn't do a consistent gray. By the 80s, technology had advanced, and the gray Hulk returned.

Other titles of the early 1980s like Camelot 3000 moved away from the four-color model of earlier superhero comics. It helped that comic companies were starting to introduce better-quality paper; Camelot 3000 was among the first to benefit from this — resulting in a hyper-aversion of this trope for the first few issues. Since the colorist wasn't used to working with genuinely white paper, the colors leap off the page at you. Later issues got things under control.

New Avengers does this a lot. In fact, it seems to have become prevalent in comic books sometime between the nineties and the twenteens.

House To Astonish refers to "the Vertigo browns": "in order to make us think everything is serious, they colour everything sepia".

The Flex Mentallo hardcover collection changed the day-glo colors of the original miniseries into Real Is Brown. (Note, for example, the bright-pink moon city, which is now medium gray.)

Film

Literature

Cormac McCarthy does a good job of conveying this in The Road. Ash has blotted out the sun for years and most of Earth's flora and fauna are dead.

Artist Jaz Parkinson created color signatures of several famous books and plays based on the number of times each color is mentioned in the work. The Road's is dark, to say the least.

based on the number of times each color is mentioned in the work. The Road's is dark, to say the least. Spike Milligan, in his war memoirs, describes the miserable time in the Italian campaign in 1943 when the autumn rains set in. For a month, Milligan related, everything in his world was brown, the all-pervading Italian mud that got everywhere and killed all other colours. Even the sky, apparently, was brown. (although here he may have been exaggerating).

Mistborn: The Original Trilogy: Since the Scadrial sky is constantly covered by ash spewed by Ash Mounts and there are also ash falls, everything is brown and gray, even plants have adapted to the limited sunlight spectrum. This gets even grayer in the second and third book, as ash falls are getting thicker and thicker and everything is dying.

Live-Action TV

Music

The office in Taylor Swift's "Ours" video is decorated in a way that makes it look very sepia-toned.

Metal bands love this trope, as evidenced by many of their album covers (especially those in Death, Black, Doom and other "extreme" subgenres). Hell, the very first metal album ever recorded, Black Sabbath's Self Titled debut, was a legendary case of this. This is also very common in their Music Videos. For example, "Internal Cannon" and "Empire" from August Burns Red's Leveler album.

The plant life on the cover of R.E.M.'s Murmur is dominated by the weed kudzu and its natural green has been browned out.

Technology

"Human", the former default color scheme in Ubuntu Linux (a distribution which likes to present itself as "Linux for human beings") is made mostly by shades of brown. Other -buntu branches have their own default colors, and the main branch had since switched to color schemes based in orange, but you can still find a "Human" theme in the repositories.

In the image editing program Paint.NET, the effect Photo -> Stylize applies a healthy brown tone, saturates the lighter parts, and softens the image to give it some bloom.

Even Nintendo is not immune to this on a meta-scale. In 2006, to commemorate the start of the seventh generation, Nintendo changed the color of their iconic red logo to grey. Ironically, Nintendo and its Wii has been one of the main resistors against this trope given its colorful games like Super Mario Galaxy and The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword. Nintendo also added a filter to their NES games on the Virtual Console that is supposed to emulate how the game would look on a TV from the 1980s, resulting in the screen looking like the brightness was turned down and the color palettes being washed out in darker colors. For example, compare the Virtual Console version of any Super Mario Bros. game to the Game Boy Advance version and you'll see how the GBA version has its colors a lot brighter and more colorful.

Toys

Following the runaway success of the first Transformers film, the toys in subsequent toylines were striving for "realism" meaning fewer Cybertronian (alien) alt-modes, and more realistic color schemes. This resulted in things like a character who traditionally was red being turned white with red trim, and more true to this trope, figures getting random brown plastic (on characters who traditionally never had any brown in their coloration). While this was mostly dropped by the time the second movie rolled around, the more realistic aesthetic did stick around for the third resulting in a great number of gray, beige, or brown vehicles.

The Lammily doll, created as counterpart of Barbie is designed with the average proportions of a healthy american woman and has brown hair and eyes, matching her "realistic features".

Webcomics

Western Animation

Animator John Kricfalusi observed a similar trend of "pee and poo colors" used to convey a depressing or serious mood in Western feature animations dating back to around 1970.

used to convey a depressing or serious mood in Western feature animations dating back to around 1970. 9 plays this straight as an arrow, but it's actually still incredibly gorgeous.

A common complaint about the 2019 version of The Lion King is that the film's more realistic landscapes, while majestic, looked drab and muddy when compared to the fantastic, multi-colored scenery of the animated original (and the stage show).

Real Life

The universe is beige (a brighter shade of brown).

(a brighter shade of brown). In places with cold winters, little snow, and lots of deciduous vegetation—the lower Midwest, for instance—this trope is very much a reality for several months of the year. The plants all die or lose their leaves, the sun sets early, and even the daytime sky is clouded over more often than not. One of the best parts about the return of spring is the return of color.

Notable Aversions and Parodies

Video Game Examples

Action Adventure

Action Game

Averted in Mirror's Edge, which takes place in a totalitarian future that's largely a sterile white and pastel shades, with the occasional splash of bright primary color. The color also works into the gameplay: Since there's no heads-up display, the game tells you how much health you have by desaturating your vision. There's also an optional feature that highlights obstacles along your route in bright red, making it much easier to tell which way you should be headed next.

Driving Game

Mostly averted in the two Need for Speed: Underground games: although the industrial zones are mostly a drab brown, the cars and the rest of the city have all sorts of bright colors, true to the glamour of the street racing scene as codified by The Fast and the Furious.

Averted in Gran Turismo 5, which is a lot more colourful than the previous games in the series.

Fighting Game

The Mushroomy Kingdom stage in Super Smash Bros. Brawl mocks the "brown = next-gen" philosophy by applying it to World 1-1 from Super Mario Bros., turning the bright stage into a deserted wasteland.

First Person Shooters

Hack and Slash

Whimsyshire and Whimsydale in Diablo III were Blizzard's response to the above-mentioned complaint about Diablo III not being dark enough.

MMORPGs

Parodied in the The Lord of the Rings Online MMORPG where the vision of your character (i.e. game world) becomes very desaturated and bloomy—but only in state of severest alcohol intoxication.

A good portion (minus the above examples) of World of Warcraft. Nearly every indoor location has a huge contrast of colors, simply based on proximity to light sources(torches, lanterns, etc.). In addition, they seem to be avoiding this more with recent content—most of Northrend is strikingly colorful. The only exception is Icecrown. And now with Cataclysm, Deepholm and Vash'jir are even more vibrant and beautiful.

Mostly averted in Warhammer Online - some of the areas are delicate shades of mud, specifically the Greenskin zones, but this is completely in character. Other areas tend to accurately mirror their host race's sensibilities (Stone buildings in countryside or snow for Empire, same but with more tentacles for Chaos, stone and metal for Dwarves, black and corrupted for Dark Elves, marble and bright colors for High Elves) in the architecture and often the landscape itself. For example - the area wracked by the Dark Elves' magic is suitable gloomy, purple and lightningy whereas its companion section for the High Elves is brightly lit, with purple trees and hills that appear to be made of sponge cake. Evidently the High Elves are fond of art, music, culture and hallucinogenic narcotics.

Similarly averted in Star Trek Online. Klingon territory tends to be painted in earth tones but this comes straight out of the shows.

Platform Game

Parodied but not quite in Ratchet: Deadlocked. One of the "cheats" is called Super Bloom, and sure enough, everything is really really bright. As noted above, however, it isn't completely averted.

Eversion. The topmost layers of the worlds are delightfully colorful, bright blues and reds and magentas. Once you start to evert, those colors get progressively muted and brownish. At least, until things start looking downright creepy. (The blood is bright red, though, and copious in abundance.) Real Is Brown is most visible in world X-5 and after that, the colors start to get more vivid again. Since Eversion never bothers to say the middle layers are realistic in any way, it's less "Real Is Brown" and more "Brown Is Ugly".

Bionic Commando Rearmed averts this by giving all the characters and objects the same bright colors they had in the original game.

Role Playing Game

In Earthbound, there exists a town called Happy Happy, home to a cult whose members believe everything is to be painted blue. So the town -as expected- uses a palette of only blue or blue-related colors. When the cultists change their ways the town takes up a more natural look.

Completely inverted in Fable, which features extremely lush, painterly, stunningly beautiful scenery ablaze with colors that are just as totally unrealistic as the next-gen brown tint.

Later games in the SaGa series look as if someone drank a couple pints of Rustoleum and barfed it up on a pre-Raphaelite painting.

The World of Mana has not lost its colorful, soft pastel palette in the move to 3D. Say what you like about Dawn of Mana, but damn does it look pretty.

Final Fantasy XIII, which was intentionally designed to be the opposite of what Final Fantasy XII presented, punches you in face with color as soon as you start up the game. Even the most color-drained area of the game, the Gapra Whitewood, is an intense shade of white and blue, with red elements.

Super Paper Mario has a nice little Take That! towards this trope during the Sammer Guy fight, where one insists that dulls colors are the next generation. You can read it under the Quotes page.

Valkyria Chronicles uses a more vibrant color palette to avert this tread, in a war themed game no less.

Simulation Game

Averted in Freelancer, where the backgrounds, despite having a dominant tone, run through a wide range of tones. The backgrounds are also color-coded: Liberty gets mostly dark blue, Bretonia gets purple and orange, Rheinland gets orange, Kusari gets light blue, the Border Worlds are usually white with blue, and the Edge Worlds are green.

Parodied in Tropico 4, where you can allow nuclear explosions near your island for money. When the nuke explodes, the whole view is temporarily tinted brown with tons of light bloom.

World of Warships averts this mostly, which is not surprising given the naval setting. Since it takes place on water the dominant color is blue. As far ever thing else goes camouflage schemes tend toward pastel colors in striking patterns, which is very much Truth in Television for ships of the World War II era. Premium ships notably also lack rust, making them look even brighter. This aversion is interesting because the game's elder stablemate, World of Tanks, mostly plays the trope completely strait.

Third Person Shooter

As the Gears of War series progressed, starting with the second game, much more diverse areas began to surface such as snowy mountain environments and caverns filled with luminescent organisms or the red and squishy belly of the giant worm. The third game includes environments such as a very green jungle and a tropical island resort in the middle of the ocean. What many copycat devs may have failed to see was that Gears 1 wasn't brown for the sake of brown, it looked like that because it took place almost entirely in the ruins of a city that had been pounded by superweapons.

In many ways, Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine is designed and marketed as the anti-Gears of War. As such, although the environments are Deliberately Monochrome (being a Forge World and all), they serve mostly as a backdrop for the vivid colors of the various character models.

Splatoon: Sure, the game in itself is about painting the arena, but the sheer level of defiance this game has against duller colors makes one think that wanting to avert this particular trope may have inspired the game somewhat.

The Last of Us, as per Naughty Dog tradition, averts this. The game takes place a couple decades after civilization falls to a Zombie Apocalypse, during which time nature has begun to reclaim ruined cities. Vines, flowers, and algae-filled water abound. In this game, Real is Green.

Wide Open Sandbox

Averted in Spore. Original in-progress videos had the game with a darker, bloomier, close-to-one-color style, while the game was still taking a realistic approach. However, this was changed for a cute and cuddly feel, and even more color than in real life was added. Expect to see bright pink creatures around the place. It was later parodied with a patch (v1.02) which included new Style Filter commands, changing how the screen is displayed. One of these is called "Next Gen", which invokes this trope.

Averted in Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, where true to its "fabulous Eighties" feel, Vice City is plastered with bright colors, white sunshine, neon lights and the great blue ocean all over the place.

While the resort and jungle in Dead Island are very colorful and lush, the slums are overwhelmingly brown and grey.

Averted in Just Cause 2. All the colors are vivid, lush, and the colors are so convincingly reminiscent of real-life tropical locales. Even the mandatory desert stage is a vivid hue of yellow instead of gray, contrasting brightly with the blue skies (except when it rains).

Parodied by Minecraft. In April Fools 2013, Mojang released a joke update called Minecraft 2.0 with lots of stupid features which basically made fun of community suggestions. One of the features was a filter called Super HD Graphics. It didn't change the resolution of the game at all, it just made everything look really brown by desaturating the graphics.

Non-video game Examples

Anime

The same article from above that noted how incredibly brown Attack on Titan is then contrasts it with Kabaneri of the Iron Fortress, which has a much more varied and cheerful color palette despite sharing a lot of production members and having a strong visual similarity and aesthetic look to Titan, indicating that the creators were definitely looking to avert this trope.

Comic Strips

A Hsu and Chan comic that poked fun at shooters like Killzone and Gears of War included this inspiring line Hsu: That's what I wanna fight for. For our dirt! For our rocks! For our sprawling rusty industrial complexes and every blessed brownish-gray inch of Vetka culture.

Films — Animated

Ralph Breaks the Internet: Slaughter Race is a GTA Online-esque open-world racing game that takes place in a drab, run-down, smog-filled city that's mostly done in shades of brown and gray, quite unlike the colorful games Ralph and Vanellope hail from.

Films — Live-Action

Dolores Claiborne has the present in dull, muted grays. In contrast, the flashbacks are in brilliant color, since they occur before the town turns against Dolores.

Live-Action TV

In both the UK and US versions of Life on Mars, the present is shown in harsh shades of white and gray, while the past is decidedly brown.

The spinoff of the UK series, Ashes to Ashes (2008) continued this theme — the past is reddish-brown, the present is white-blue.

The producers of Miami Vice explicitly called for "no earth tones", in order to maintain the MTV style of the show. In the words of one of the episode directors: "There are certain colors you are not allowed to shoot, such as red and brown. If the script says 'A Mercedes pulls up here,' the car people will show you three or four different Mercedes. One will be white, one will be black, one will be silver. You will not get a red or brown one. Michael knows how things are going to look on camera." The 2006 movie, on the other hand, went for Orange/Blue Contrast, giving it a much blander look that was not well received. In one of the darker periods for Doctor Who production values, the team ran out of money to afford sets, and instead shot most of the episode "Underworld" with CSO Miniature Effects sets. In order to make this look more realistic, all the sets were made brown. Most viewers find the effect of this is just to make the obviously unrealistic effect more difficult to see.

Software

Web Comics

The Trope Namer is a parody in VG Cats, where Aeris digitizes Leo into a video game and abuses him with environmental settings. Image at the top of this trope page.

This Subnormality strip spoofs it in a workplace setting.

Subnormality strip spoofs it in a workplace setting. The Alt Text of this Level 30 Psychiatry comic makes reference to this trope when talking about Dr. Gardevoir's split persona 's dull color scheme. Apparently hallucination have the same palete as third person shooters.

Web Original