It's amazing how much we take for granted now. It's not worth my time to consider color palettes and manually encoding images in a binary blob, but to the craftsmen and women who worked on this game, it really mattered. I'm grateful that I can stand on the shoulders of giants and focus my attention on other problems, but to me there is something romantic about working on such a focused technical problem. For me, these are the amazing 'castles in the air' that Fred Brooks was talking about.
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Fred_Brooks