Development environments in the 80's and 90's were so simple that you had to program down to every pixel shown on the screen (well, maybe calling some line and sprite primitives for speed), so you only needed to learn a small mental model for programming, and everything above it was designed by you. Also, the primitive hardware and no expectations of portability meant that you only had to care about one or two combinations of platforms (maybe supporting a small range of graphics and sound cards).
This can help teach younger developers to understand the basic principles, and get a glimpse of how things are done below the surface of those modern do-it-all gaming engines.
Development environments in the 80's and 90's were so simple that you had to program down to every pixel shown on the screen (well, maybe calling some line and sprite primitives for speed), so you only needed to learn a small mental model for programming, and everything above it was designed by you. Also, the primitive hardware and no expectations of portability meant that you only had to care about one or two combinations of platforms (maybe supporting a small range of graphics and sound cards).
This can help teach younger developers to understand the basic principles, and get a glimpse of how things are done below the surface of those modern do-it-all gaming engines.