On that point, a friend of mine recently had the revelation that part of what makes old games special is that their creativity was bounded-- or rather stimulated-- by hardware limitations.
But I'd take that in a different-but-related direction: making games back then was hard. To make a Sega Genesis game, you had to write 68000 assembler, a skill which only the most autistic people on the planet could successfully do. And people tend to design games which they would like-- which is why the games catered to genuine eggheaded dweebs like me.
Today, you fire up UnrealEd and drag and drop your basic C++ classes into the editor. Boom. Heck, in modern engines you can even script basic games as if you were making a Visio diagram.
Because the bar is so low, the autistic people moved on to more challenging things, and in came all of the craft beer, flannel-shirted, "counter-culture", not-talented-enough-for-Hollywood hipsters. Who then went on to make games which channeled their desperate need for approval into a desperate need for video games as a medium to be popularly approved.
But back to the hardware: I recently reviewed two games which are simply impossible for modern technology to execute due to having piss-poor controllers-- which I had to fix by purchasing the Super Nintendo-replica with a functioning d-pad, as you see in the picture above-- and insane levels of input latency.
On that note, Henrietta and I were trying to enjoy the new "Let's Go" Pokemon game a couple of hours ago, and between the Switch's input latency, the television's latency, and the crappy-ass Bluetooth-driven "joy-con" waggle controls, we couldn't hit the broad side of a barn: randomly animations would be delayed, or the throws would go to the side, or register on the back part of the arm motion, and so on.
Then on top of that, my Vizio soundbar kept cutting in and out, because modern audio equipment doesn't just pass the electrical signal straight to the speakers like a stereo from the 1990s (or earlier): it tries to process and finesse the sound by altering volume levels and all manner of smoke and mirrors tricks.
After about a half hour, we gave up. So I hopped on over to my real Sega Saturn, turned on my real CRT, grabbed my real controller with a real d-pad, and played a super satisfying game of "Street Fighter Alpha 2"-- all with technology from 1996-- with zero missed special moves and absolutely zero discernible input latency whatsoever.