I know that's not the same but the concepts are similar. The core of most of those games is only a few k, everything else is graphics and/or interfacing with modern OSes.
Older systems had much lower resolutions, they also used languages that were arguably harder to use. In the 80s it was BASIC (no functions, only global variables and "GOSUB"). Variable names generally were 1 or 2 letters making them harder to read. Or they used assembly.
90s (or late 80s) C started doing more but still, most games ran in 320x240, sprites were small, many games used tiles, many hardware only supported tiles and sprites (NES, Sega Master System, SNES, Genesis). It wasn't really until 3DO/PS1 that consoles had non-tiled graphics. PC and Amiga always did had bitmapped graphics but Atari 800, C64, the majority of games used the hardware tiled modes.
https://www.lexaloffle.com/pico-8.php
Also JS13k
https://js13kgames.com/
I know that's not the same but the concepts are similar. The core of most of those games is only a few k, everything else is graphics and/or interfacing with modern OSes.
Older systems had much lower resolutions, they also used languages that were arguably harder to use. In the 80s it was BASIC (no functions, only global variables and "GOSUB"). Variable names generally were 1 or 2 letters making them harder to read. Or they used assembly.
90s (or late 80s) C started doing more but still, most games ran in 320x240, sprites were small, many games used tiles, many hardware only supported tiles and sprites (NES, Sega Master System, SNES, Genesis). It wasn't really until 3DO/PS1 that consoles had non-tiled graphics. PC and Amiga always did had bitmapped graphics but Atari 800, C64, the majority of games used the hardware tiled modes.