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I’ve written software professionally for two decades and I’m still in awe of the people who used to wring every last drop out of 512kb of memory, a floppy drive and 16 colours on the Amiga 500.
I played some pretty good games on the 48k spectrum back in the day. My first computer was a zx81 with 1k ram, it was a bit challenging to do anything interesting with it - but people still wrote games for the thing.
While true that it's impressive, now games have to be made to work on variable screen sizes with different input controllers, key mappings, configurations, more operating systems, with more features than ever. It's an absolute explosion of complexity.
Even making a 2D game for today's hardware is more difficult than making a 2D game for Gameboy.
Honest question, is that true? It's my understanding that developing a 2D game today would be a simpler task than for a system from the 90s due to so many improvements in development software.
I used to write assembly for microcontrollers, and could fit in 128 bytes RAM, and about 2KB of ROM a program that managed a dot matrix display with real time clock and temperature sensor (on i2c)
It isn't that difficult or mysterious, just efficient use of resources that the chips had.
And just for giggles, know that my boss had me present the whole program in detailed flow charts on paper before burning those expensive micros. It was normal to get it right on the first try.