The golf games (Leaderboard Golf comes to mind: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4jA5eKk10Wo&t=803) had to do this because it took incredibly long time to render a 3D map on the screen. No chance those machines could've rendered the whole scene within a few frames.
The games just made it a visual gimmick for the player to watch the drawing instead of offering a waiting screen, rendering to a backbuffer and then copying the image over.
Frankly, I wouldn't be surprised if the rendering was even made a bit slower so that the player can see the areas fill up in human-scale time. For example, a C64 with 6502 can fill polygons faster than what you see on the screen.
The games just made it a visual gimmick for the player to watch the drawing instead of offering a waiting screen, rendering to a backbuffer and then copying the image over.
Frankly, I wouldn't be surprised if the rendering was even made a bit slower so that the player can see the areas fill up in human-scale time. For example, a C64 with 6502 can fill polygons faster than what you see on the screen.