[krapp]

First, most hackathon games are terrible. They don't even rise to the level of coherence of those former games, because they're mostly thrown together into the first vaguely "game-like" thing that compiles, with half the gameplay in orders of magnitude more space.

Second, those games are only possible due to the existence of frameworks, high-level languages and the proliferation of programming knowledge over the internet. Almost no one doing a weekend hackathon is cranking out a playable game in raw assembly.

Now to be fair, most games in the 80s were terrible as well - that's part of what led to the crash, and it's just Sturgeon's Law in effect. But what's being praised here isn't really design skill so much as a level of programming skill which simply isn't strictly necessary in the modern day to create a game.