And before that, 2D games (side-scrolling platformers were not a thing on PC hardware until Carmack did it, iirc). I think his main thing is balancing clarity - what happens when and in what order - with maintainability.
Compare this with enterprise software, which is orders of magnitude more complex than video games in terms of business logic (the complexity in video games is in performance optimization), but whose developers tend to add many layers of abstraction and indirection, so the core business process is obfuscated, or there's a billion non-functional side activities also being applied (logging, analytics, etc), again obfuscating the core functionality.
It's fun to go back to more elementary programming things, in e.g. Advent of Code challenges or indeed, game development.
Compare this with enterprise software, which is orders of magnitude more complex than video games in terms of business logic (the complexity in video games is in performance optimization), but whose developers tend to add many layers of abstraction and indirection, so the core business process is obfuscated, or there's a billion non-functional side activities also being applied (logging, analytics, etc), again obfuscating the core functionality.
It's fun to go back to more elementary programming things, in e.g. Advent of Code challenges or indeed, game development.