Why are NES backgrounds always black or mostly black?

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I really love Nintendo, and I definitely dont hate the NES, but why? Just curious. Like this:

Hardware limitations in many cases, probably.

I know that's certainly the case for when you would fight some particularly large enemy or something, the NES wasnt good at large sprites (frankly it wasnt good at sprites at all), and fights with very large bosses in most games tended to happen against a pure black background as a result.

In other situations it was probably other similar technical things. Particularly in earlier games, like Metroid, where the background was always black. It's an old console, after all.

Okay thaaankksss~

I'm sure someone from NESdev could give a much more detailed answer, but I know that with most NES mappers, tiles/sprites are limited to a selection of four colors each. With sprites, one of those colors is transparent (so not actually a color), so if the background is black, it kind of gives the illusion that the sprites have one extra color to them (black).

It might also have something to do with background tile limitations of early mappers, but I don't really know the details there. Lots of early games, like the SMB series, Zelda series, etc. had colorful tile backgrounds, so maybe black was just an aesthetic choice.

Atari 2600 didn't have too many black backgrounds, but I know a lot of arcade games of the time did.

I've done a tiny bit of NES programming in the past, so I'll put my two cents in. The general way NES graphics work is that the background is composed of a 30x32 grid of 8x8 pixel tiles. Then, up to 64 sprites can be rendered, which are 8x8 or 8x16 images that are rendered on top of the background. The colors of all of the images are determined by palettes which are loaded into the graphics processor (PPU) at runtime. I really think the background color was an aesthetic choice, rather than a technical limitation. White text on black background is easily readable. Look at Super Mario Bros. You can see all of the individual images that are composed into the final image that you see on the screen. And it has a blue background instead of a black one.

It wasn't just NES games. Early arcade games often had black backgrounds. Many Atari 2600 games had a colored background, but there were usually only two or three colors in the whole game. And two sound effects.

On a related note, what's the most complex NES game that didn't use any mappers?

Because you aren't filling it in with your mind effectively, old sparser games tend to root me much more than the modern marvels as I simply flood my own associations and chains into the background and wonder what is actually hidden from sight. It's a similar swell to what I remember playing with cars and figures and such as a child, I can't feel much any longer from using physical props even though my imagination is unhealthily overflowing but with the simpler computer games it still retains that tidal depth.