Ah, the halcyon days of tight hardware resources
Back then, you had to be competent to make a game run. The difficulty getting anything on screen was already a first hurdle and, as said here, once you had your screen you had crumbs left over for the code and data.
Nowadays, they'll just tell you that you need 16GB of RAM to run the game, but hey! there's 7,486,684,325 planets to explore !
And they're all in memory.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
