Tom's is pixel art. The one you're claiming he stole isn't even pixel art. How could he have stolen it? He didn't modify it at all because modifying it would have meant erasing it all and starting over. Even if he was
inspired by the chest that's okay because inspiration is fine. Theft is not.
Also it's A GOD DAMN CHEST. ALMOST ALL CHESTS LOOK THE SAME. I just made a chest for a client and you know what? It looked like the wooden chest in the image you posted because ALL WOODEN CHESTS LOOK IDENTICAL.
Here I'll break it down for you. The chest you said Tom stole it from? Guess what. If I take your little process I can make it look like IT was stolen from any number of other chests floating around on the internet too. In fact the red one looks a lot like the chests in Zelda.
I'm done with this because I feel even if I broke down every single pixel in the images and told you why they're not stolen or in fact even referenced in any way you wouldn't get it. I normally don't say this but kindly gtfo out of my thread with your off-topic bull****.
I'm going to humor myself and try to approach this with reason and facts instead of bull****ting around with nonsense and claiming that anyone who opposes me does so because they're friends and yada yada and other half-assed attempts to justify myself.
1)
Here I'm going to take both chests and completely remove all shading to reveal the overall shape and design of the chest.
I don't see how these look even remotely similar.
2) You said Tom's chests is not 32x32 and it clearly is. However the chest YOU'RE defending does NOT fit into 32x32, but they tried to anyways. It ends up missing an entire pixel of outline on the left side.
3) Let's look at the finer details of the artwork.
Tom's chest is mostly boring, to be completely honest. Its shading is pretty typical and nothing really makes me think it's really that interesting. However if you look at the metal of the red chest you'll see a very distinct difference. The shadows jump STRAIGHT to the darkest shade. This creates a visible line of contrast often seen in metals(because metals often reflect silhouettes of their surroundings). Tom's shading on his metal is pretty boring, again. Just goes from bright highlights to a smooth shadow with buffers all the way down. Also the red chest has a visible highlight going up the entire side of the chest. This is something again, Tom's metal lacks.
4) Again, lets look at the details
Tom's chest took a very cartoony and stylistic approach to highlighting the corner of the chest. Here he inserts a very bright square to make the corners 'pop.' This is not something that makes sense as far as how light really works but it's a stylistic decision. The point is again, you do not see this very bright pop in the corner of the red chest.
5) Let's look at the overall shading technique that you apparently were trying to bring up before.
First, I will say that I'm not sure where you're expecting some magnificant difference in how they're shaded. First you criticize him for inserting a highlight that 'makes no sense' but using that very logic it wouldn't make sense for the shading of two chests depicting the
same shape to NOT look the same. They both feature a cylindrical top therefor they will be dark at the bottom and they will become lighter towards the top. This is 101 stuff. However I will debunk more anyways. First, they invoke two completely different visual feelings. Tom's is again somewhat boring. It features no strong highlight on the actual chest(not the metallic border) so looks very dull and non-metallic. This is different from the chest on the right because its chest has a strong highlight that contrasts strongly and creates a visual pop giving the impression that it is metal. The borders of Tom's chest drops no shadow on the object itself, while the red chest has black drops on the right side of the metal borders that give the impression of a shadow.
6) Finally, Tom's chest is much more cartoony. It features obvious black outlines not only on the exterior but interior. It also has much simpler shading and a dull appearance. The red chest actually has no clear distinctive outlines, on the exterior or interior. The coloring/shading of the chest often bleeds over into the outlines, or they are selectively erased(for example on the LEFT side of the metallic borders there are no outlines, to simulate light from that side, while on the RIGHT side there are clear outlines, but they end up looking like shadows). And the chest on the right also lets the content break the outline to provide more depth.
You'll also notice Tim used an abnormal color to cast a shadow under the keyhole -- purple. First it implies a limited palette, something the red chest does not have and two purple compliments yellow/gold. Either way, again, it's something not seen in the red chest.
Final conclusion? They both look like chests because they're both chests.