[hgs3]

> There is very little opportunity today for any team (let alone individual person) to push the boundaries of the technology in a meaningful way.

Checkout the demoscene.

An example of a megahit that started as a tech demo was Teardown [1]. It features a fully destructible world running on a custom game engine created by one guy. It succeeded because of the technical "wow" factor.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teardown_(video_game)