I think you had a maladjusted TV or something. On a good TV or composite monitor, pixel art should have fairly sharp edges. Most televisions had adjustment controls for various thing (sharpness, contrast, tint, color, etc); so many people didn't know how to properly adjust them, though.

My first video game system was a cheapo b/w pong clone knockoff thing from radio shack. My second was an Atari 2600. Later my parents bought me a TRS-80 Color Computer 2 with 16K (which eventually got upgraded to 32, then 64K), and then still later a Color Computer 3. An NES was in there somewhere, and I played on friend's Sega Genesis systems and C=64 computers (plus Apple IIe, PCjr, and others).

Pixel art (back then, they were just "sprites" or "tiles" to us - I'm not sure if the term "pixel art" was a thing then - I never heard it, but it doesn't mean it wasn't) wasn't fuzzy or soft, unless things weren't adjusted right.

The only other time it might be a little funky was if the machine in question was trying to use artifacting in some manner:

http://nerdlypleasures.blogspot.com/2013/09/the-overlooked-a...

As you can see - artifacting could introduce a certain level of "fuzziness" to graphics; but scroll to the bottom of that page, to see what the CoCo 2 could do in the hands of someone competent with the effect.

The CoCo 2 got 4 colors on an effectively black/white screen mode by interleaving black and white values - spaced close together on the screen, the NTSC system would render alternate colors - red/blue instead, depending on certain other factors - there was an alternate color mode (green/black) that got you purple and grey or something like that as well - this kind of thing didn't work with PAL CoCo systems (or Dragon 32 - also PAL).

The CoCo 3 could simulate certain "extra colors" on a TV or composite monitor if you dropped into the 640x200 screen (4 colors) and played with pixel patterns. What wasn't widely known then (one guy figured it out - but published his results in Hot CoCo magazine, which wasn't as widely read as The Rainbow magazine was - and so his efforts went mostly unnoticed!) was that with the right pixel patterns over 4 pixels (thus reducing the actual resolution to 160x200 - an almost square "screen"), and using the 4 grayscales available on the CoCo 3 (black, white, and a dark gray and light gray) - you could generate (again, using NTSC artifacting) hundreds of colors!

http://www.coco3.com/community/2009/12/composite-artifacting...

http://richg42.blogspot.com/2014/02/the-little-known-color-c...

This was rediscovered long after the CoCo 3 was out to pasture so to speak - in the 2000s; it's kinda sad, as it is almost the rumored (likely false) "256-color" mode in practice, and might have done wonders for games back in the day had it been fully utilized, vs the 320x200 16 color mode that was available (there was also a 160x200 16 color mode); these modes were out of a total of 64 colors (which could also be displayed simultaneously if the processor was doing nothing else, by swapping the palette on the horizontal retrace at the right moments - but it wasn't used for more than still images at best; some image displayers for digitizers also used it to swap r/g/b patches of palette on the vertical retrace to get a very flickery form of high-color for special digitized pictures - also, there was a similar way of doing things on the CoCo 2 to get all 8 of it's colors onscreen at once in one of the "mid-res" modes - it was used for a game called "DragonFire":

http://www.lcurtisboyle.com/nitros9/dragonfire.html

Lately, people have used these tricks and such to do some weird stuff with the CoCo:

https://hackaday.com/2011/04/21/tandy-color-computer-coco3-c...

Then of course, you also have the possibilities offered by CGA on a composite monitor:

https://int10h.org/blog/2015/04/cga-in-1024-colors-new-mode-...

Which is also a good primer on artifacting itself. And of course:

https://int10h.org/blog/2015/08/8088-mph-final-old-vs-new-cg...

http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=65371

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yHXx3orN35Y

Ok - enough of that - downvote this nostalgia trip - I'm sorry...