[PaulHoule]

Software systems were simpler back in the day.

Steve Wozniak 'coded' Breakout in 45 chips on a circuit board, then coded it in assembly and coded it again in BASIC to prove somebody could.

There was a limit to how big of a program you could fit in an Apple ][.

A modern game could have a development budget more than a Hollywood movie and fill a whole Blu-Ray disc.

From one perspective it is a miracle of progress that the modern game works at all.

[sowbug]

Because systems were simpler, the teams that produced them were simpler, too. In the 1980s it was common for one person to have developed an entire commercial program. Just take a look at The Giant List of Classic Game Programmers (https://dadgum.com/giantlist/) and note how many amazing games were written by just one person. It's a lot easier to QA a program when you wrote the entire thing and can manually test it in a few minutes.

But simpler has its cost. Whenever I fire up an emulator to relive my childhood Apple II days, I'm amazed how crude that stuff was. I remember magical worlds and incredible, fast animations. Today they're just flickering 16x16 blobs.

[PaulHoule]

Single people wrote whole commercial programs in assembly language in four to six months.

Of course, C is overrated and not much easier than a good macro assembler, but people working on micros in 1980 often didn't have a good macro assembler and even people working today don't have good macro assemblers.

I would have given up Arduino programming in C long ago if it wasn't for the possibility that I might need something more powerful than AVR-8 and C is portable.