First, most hackathon games are terrible. They don&#x27;t even rise to the level of coherence of those former games, because they&#x27;re mostly thrown together into the first vaguely &quot;game-like&quot; thing that compiles, with half the gameplay in orders of magnitude more space.<p>Second, those games are only possible due to the existence of frameworks, high-level languages and the proliferation of programming knowledge over the internet. Almost no one doing a weekend hackathon is cranking out a playable game in raw assembly.<p>Now to be fair, most games in the 80s were terrible as well - that&#x27;s part of what led to the crash, and it&#x27;s just Sturgeon&#x27;s Law in effect. But what&#x27;s being praised here isn&#x27;t really design skill so much as a level of programming skill which simply isn&#x27;t strictly necessary in the modern day to create a game.