Thank you! I still have mad respect for people that had to work with what they had, and produced something truly playable - for example, things like Atari's Pitfall. That hardware was positively primitive and it took real creativity to make something memorable.

I think it's here where David Crane explains it, for example. I think I remember a video on the creation of Adventure on Atari, and the hacks that were required...for every platform (before and since) there are usually some constraints the creators are working with; the fact that many of these systems were able to do what they did often blows me away. I think as time goes on, obviously orders of power - memory, speed, storage have exploded, but then the creators are asked to do even more at that point, usually hitting some limit, but I'd never call what they did "bad".

https://vid.puffyan.us/watch?v=MBT1OK6VAIU