I’ve been wondering this recently. I grew up on atari/nes/snes and so of course almost all of those games (pretty sure all) are written in assembly and are rock solid smooth and responsive for the most part. I wonder if this has affected how I cannot stand to play badly optimized games eith even a hint of a laggy feel to it. I’ve always been drawn to quake and cs for that reason: damn smooth. And no, it doesn’t just need to be FPS games either. I cant play beat saber with a modicum of lag or i suck massively, but others can play just fine and not even notice the lag.
Its odd. I feel like a complainer but maybe I just notice it more easily than others?
Classics still had lag. DK Country 3’s final boss was so laggy it’d affect the boss music.
Not quite super classic you mentioned but a chunk of the speed run tech around Super Mario 64 is how to optimize the camera to avoid lagging on certain effects (the sunshine to the wing cap, the top tower in whomps fortress, the sub in dire dire docks).
Also OOT only ran at 20 fps
Ocarina of Time ran at 20 fps as a compromise for it having the largest draw distance of any game on the Nintendo64.
Oh absolutely
I say that less as a knock on the game and more that there were technical compromises made back in the day as well. Nostalgia sometime last hits and people assume everything ran blazing fast.