Let me hand you some binoculars, it might be hard to see the details from the vantage point of giants' shoulders:
* A lot of things "missed" is what further research proved to be "obvious" conclusions of exactly the groundwork laid by these games.
* Between 80h/week, personal life and the permanent question whether your game will sell at all, considerations what you should do in case your game becomes a cultural heritage are moot.
I have been part of this circus 15 years ago and while I definitely am proud of what I did, I do not think any lessons I learned are directly relevant today. Not only that, but I can not imagine to revisit my old code for any amount of money. Yes, my build system increased build speed by a factor of 200 over industry standards, but no, I am not going through those 2.5k loc gnu-make ever again. Or to even document the tricks we used to deliver a 80k jar, including assets.
A lot of the stuff was done to deal with hardware limitations that are irrelevant today. Why go through a lot of pain when the resources today are sufficient to play 100 instances of an unoptimized rewrite in an emulator?
* A lot of things "missed" is what further research proved to be "obvious" conclusions of exactly the groundwork laid by these games.
* Between 80h/week, personal life and the permanent question whether your game will sell at all, considerations what you should do in case your game becomes a cultural heritage are moot.
I have been part of this circus 15 years ago and while I definitely am proud of what I did, I do not think any lessons I learned are directly relevant today. Not only that, but I can not imagine to revisit my old code for any amount of money. Yes, my build system increased build speed by a factor of 200 over industry standards, but no, I am not going through those 2.5k loc gnu-make ever again. Or to even document the tricks we used to deliver a 80k jar, including assets.
A lot of the stuff was done to deal with hardware limitations that are irrelevant today. Why go through a lot of pain when the resources today are sufficient to play 100 instances of an unoptimized rewrite in an emulator?