I can only speak for myself but my brain was the Wild West when I was a kid. There was no canon for it to draw on in terms of how or why things were the way they were and this especially applied to creative pursuits like TV shows, movies, music, and video games. I had all sorts of insane ideas about how cool it'd be to implement certain mechanics, characters, etc. in games but this was, of course, virtually impossible at the time. Decompilation paves a reliable path to this type of experimentation - see all of the ridiculous SM64 and Goldeneye mods that are available now (with demos on YouTube).