Is there a limit when looking at retro games when the retro-ness becomes a burden rather than "old games is simpler"? Obviously if you move too far back in history you end up with basically game specific hardware, long-dead assembler code. In the original wolfenstein it seems there is a bunch of code relating to things that manage weirdness that we no longer care about (paging, legacy graphics handling) which obscure the actual game.
Was there a "peak" in simplicity when games were at their simplest for a reader from 2022? That is, they are modern enough to not be obscured by historical weirdness yet still simple enough to be approachable? Perhaps Doom is simpler to understand than Wolfenstein for this reason?
The trick isn’t to look at the complete game code which will
always have platform specific code but rather look at the tricks used by the game engines that are conceptual. Or in other words, look at the design rather than the implementation.
This is true even for modern games, because you might implement something differently for a mobile game than you might for a high end PC.
Was there a "peak" in simplicity when games were at their simplest for a reader from 2022? That is, they are modern enough to not be obscured by historical weirdness yet still simple enough to be approachable? Perhaps Doom is simpler to understand than Wolfenstein for this reason?