They didn't get distracted by phones, the internet, or multitasking. When you sat in front of your computer, you could only do one thing at a time on it, and you dedicated all your attention to it. You didn't have a company chat or email window popping up notifications about irrelevant stuff, you didn't get the urge to look up random things on Wikipedia, etc. You probably also got to sit in a small room without a lot of distractions too, instead of sitting in a huge open-office area next to the sales group.

And little prior art to draw inspiration from!

The 1980-2000 era was just a raw font of imagination for video games. Since then things have become more iterative and tend to focus on maximizing profits, though thankfully there is a lot of creativity in indie studios/solo devs being empowered by the increasing ease of modern game engines, and even some bigger studios here and there, like FromSoftware.

Passion + skill > Total compensation optimization + Javascript.

The complexity and creativity of early video games from the 1980s and even earlier are truly impressive

hey, are you the guy that tried to steal freenode?