[brigade]

They were just coming out of the Atari crash, which in a large part was blamed on a surplus of shitty games.

[userbinator]

The 2600 was not exactly easy to make any good games with either, containing only 128 bytes of RAM and having very primitive graphics capabilities.

[senko]

I had to double-check this because I was sure you must have made a typo. Indeed, it was 128 bytes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_2600

In that time the code and "assets" (such as they were) didn't reside in RAM (it was all in the cartrige), so this was only for a game state. Still, other home computer systems at that time (while addmittedly a few times more expensive) had plenty more ram, measuring in kilobytes!