I was selling my watch the other day when this blonde comes in and asks the guy behind the counter:
"Hi, is this a pawn shop?"
"Yes."
"Good, because I need to buy one for my chessboard."

Also...

Interestingly, most games were using a 320x200 resolution at that time, and that's a 16:10 aspect ratio. Some programmers haven't always taken that into account. As a result some games were actually "squished" on standard monitors.

But this resolution was almost always meant for non-square pixels. The result was still meant for a 3:4 monitor aspect ratio.

Hmm, that's not exactly the case. Yes, that would be a 16:10 aspect ratio if the pixels were square, but they weren't. They were actually rectangular. All monitors were 4:3 back then, and the graphics were designed with that in mind, so games weren't actually "squished".

Edit: Ninja'd by ZFR ;-)

Square pixels are actually a modern luxury that we tend to take so much for granted that we rarely even consider that they could be any other shape. However, pre-VGA, rectangular pixels were the norm.

True, but that's simply something not everyone considered while making assets. The round objects are easiest to spot this. Just look at the moon in Mortal Kombat 1 for example. The screen is squished at 4:3 monitors (and to make it even more weird - in the arcade cabinet as well, but that used a 400x254 resolution, still closer to 16:10 than 4:3), it's slightly stretched at 16:9. The 16:10 is the only case where it looks right.

Sorry, but I're a little angry right now.

I realise how it worked. What I'm talking about is clearly an oversight on designers part. It was rare but it did happen occasionally. I'll try to get some screenshots later.

Ah, you just made it sound like it was a common occurrence, which I don't recall it to have been at all.

Mortal Kombat famously used mostly digitized graphics, which may account for why the problem occurred in that game specifically. Digitization was cumbersome and expensive back then, and I have no trouble believing that digitizers at the time had a fixed resolution and pixel shape.

Here's a screenshot showing the Mortal Kombat moon, which, as you say, does indeed look quite squished: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/UQZUzSIB_Rw/maxresdefault.jpg

Edit: Okay, forget about the screenshot. The moon looks squished there because the screenshot itself has been scaled up to 1920x1080 (16:9). Looking at screenshots on Google, I'm amazed that almost no two of them are the same resolution. I honestly don't know which resolution the game actually ran at, but in most of the screenshots I see, the moon is not flattened horizontally.

The moon is not as noticeable as I remember, but it is slightly squished (see attachment). The issue is actually more visible on this screen when you compare the 2 character sizes.

Well the screenshot you linked appears to be for an arcade port for XBox, and the one you attached was obviously modified from the original, so...

Still, after looking at screenshots for various versions of it on MobyGames, it seems that the original arcade game ran in 400x254, the Amiga version ran in 320x240 (so square pixels) and the DOS version ran in 320x200. Given the digitized nature of the graphics, it is therefore not too far-fetched to imagine that the aspect ratio of some of the graphics would have been a bit wonky in some versions of the game.

Edit: Also, looking at screenshots as-is on a modern hi-res 16:9 monitor will be useless for determining whether the graphics were squished/stretched. Any screenshot you view in the original resolution will be rendered with square pixels by your modern monitor. You will have to resize the screenshot unevenly to a 4:3 resolution in order to be able to judge it. For the DOS version, anyway, since that was definitely rendered in 4:3. I don't know about the arcade version.

The point is that the arcade was also using a 4:3 screen. The screens I posted were from Arcade Kollection, but the point was that it used the scaling to the original aspect ratio. The art at the sides of the screen is meant for that (and it was used because it obviously looks better than black bars). This is as close to the arcade as it gets, other than MAME. The other option for the scaling in AK is stretch, which removes the art and fills the game full screen.

Ah, right. And if I scale an original screenshot from the arcade version to 4:3, I'm seeing the same thing. The moon is elongated vertically, because the pixels are elongated vertically.

I misunderstood what you were saying then. I thought you meant that they handled the graphics wrong when they ported the game from the arcade to the other platforms, but they actually handled it wrong when they made the arcade game in the first place. Interestingly, the moon looks quite round in the Amiga version, which makes sense since it uses square pixels as opposed to both the DOS and arcade versions. As such, it outputs the images using the same aspect ratio as they were originally input from the digitizer.