Games back then were a bit of a dark art...

I feel like I don't really encounter stories of heroics in making games work on their hardware anymore. Even at the end of PS1 with Final Fantasy their hand drawn backgrounds were too big to fit into VRAM iirc

Or in the PS2 era Jak and Daxter using the principle of hot reloading from lisp to figure out open worlds without loading screens

The limitations nowadays for game development are more on the budget side than the hardware.

The fact that a single dev used to be able to complete an entire game really makes me wish I had come of age back in the day when that was possible. I feel like you can only approach something similar with pico-8 or another fantasy console these days.

But it still is! None of the technology that made these games possible has disappeared; quite the opposite, as you already mention (with Pico-8 etc.)

Wasn't Hollow Knight put together with a really tiny team?

> Link's Awakening feels like it shouldn't be possible in a single megabyte of mask ROM

Half a megabyte, even! (For the original monochrome game - the later color version is a full megabyte.)

Ah, right, I fortunately slept on it long enough to get the DX version right away! The photographer side plot was amazing, especially with a Game Boy Printer :)