Great write-up! Pondering this question is the thing that brought my into software development in the first place. It was fascinating back then how my big, expensive, PC/XT would struggle to make anything run half as smoothly as a Game Boy. PC games with contents spread over several floppy disks, taking MEGABYTES of space and slowly crunch-crunch-crunching whenever I'd go to a different screen in Quest for Glory, but you could play in the immersive game of Zelda seamlessly.

It's good to look back and appreciate the fundamentals, since there was a lot of clever thinking in this we can learn from today. There are often times I'll come up with an overly hefty solution in a generic case, instead of thinking like Nintendo did about focusing on making something cool to look at with a fun experience, though with a much narrower scope. NLP is one place I see this a lot - it's often very easy to make aws happy when I go through GBs of data, for something where 95% of the value to the end user could be reached with a 50kB file on the S3. Dapps are another one - helps a lot to think like a Nintendo dev in the 80s about what the reusable parts of your data are.