[im_down_w_otp]

You still have to be clever like that today depending on what kind of problems you're working on.

Which was also true back then. Not all programmers back then had to derive arcanely clever tricks to get their job done.

There's also a part of it that is underappreciated, which is that sometimes the cool effect wasn't necessarily an original design goal, but instead was sometimes something that was stumbled upon one way or another, and then it was having that little trick in one's pocket which informed how the design would be.

[Qwertystop]

One good example of this: Space Invaders was, AFAIK, the first game to feature escalating difficulty over time (because the aliens speed up the more of them you shoot). This wasn't originally part of the design; the system just couldn't run at the same framerate while managing 30 sprites as it could at 5, and there weren't any enforced timing checks.

[jdsully]

There were quite a few “professional” software packages written in BASIC at the time. Of course most software needed assembly in the early days.