[kabdib]

My first job out of college at Atari in 1982, writing game cartridges for the 400/800 computers, paid $25K a year. My first raise after a year was to $30K.

There were programmers in other divisions making royalties off of their games. Tod Frye famously got $700K or so for his terrible version of 2600 Pac-Man (it was terrible not because he was a bad programmer, but because marketing decided that 2K of ROM had to be enough, and he was smart enough to pull off a miracle . . . of sorts).

Also, the OP apparently doesn't know how to unroll loops, which is the first thing you do to your game's hot spots. (Never had to resort to self-modifying code).

[DerekL]

The Pac-Man cart was 4k, not 2k. But maybe it should have been 8k, like Ms. Pac-Man later was.

[kabdib]

You are correct on both accounts :-) (I mis-remembered the ROM size).