I am a bit said that it is always Doom.

Now ... I played the game when I was young. It was addictive. I don't think it was a good game but it was addictive. And somewhat simple.

So what is the problem then? Well ... games have gotten a lot bigger, often more complicated. Trying to port that to small platforms is close to impossible. This makes me sad. I think the industry, excluding indie tech/startups, totally lost the focus here. The games that are now en vogue, do not interest me at all. Sometimes they have interesting ideas - I liked little nightmares here - but they are huge and very different from the older games. And often much more boring too.

One of my favourite DOS games was master of orion 1 for instance. I could, despite its numerous flaws, play that again and again and again. Master of Orion 2 was not bad either, but it was nowhere near as addictive and the gameplay was also more convoluted and slower.

(Sometimes semi-new games are also ok such as Warcraft 3. I am not saying ALL new games are bad, but it seems as if games were kind of dumbed down to be more like a video to watch, with semi-few interactive elements as you watch it. That's IMO not really a game. And just XP grinding for the big bad wolf to scale to the next level, deal out more damage, as your HP grows ... that's not really playing either. That's just wasting your time.)

It's Doom in part because it's a significantly popular game, that was open sourced, with low resource requirements (but not too low to be trivial), with an innovative custom engine that people find interesting, originally created by a person who many respect or admired growing up, and the game itself is cool. And now there is enough inertia to keep choosing it.

Most people don't realize that games were small back then because they had to be.

The value of being small for most users almost doesn't exist. If you have bandwidth limits then yeah download size is important but most don't.

So the only meaningful change optimizations make is "will it run well enough" and "does it fit on my disk".

Put more plainly "if it works at all it doesn't matter" is how most consumers (probably correctly) treat performance optimizations/installation size.

The sacrifices you talk about were made at explicit request of consumers. Games have to be "long enough" and the difference between enough game loop and grinding is a taste thing. Games have to be "pretty" and for better or worse stylized takes effort and is a taste thing (see Wind Waker) while fancy high res lighting engines are generally recognized as good.

I will say though while being made by indies means they are optimized terribly the number of stylized short games is phenomenally high it can just be hard to find them.

Especially since it is difficult for an hour or two game to be as impactful as a similar length movie so they tend to not be brought up as frequently.

Im with you. I want to play Freespace 2 on earbuds.