Just because a game could graphically have been displayed on an N64 doesn’t mean the game could be built. Vampire Survivors has hundreds of units on screen at a time firing hundreds of projectiles and weapon effects; running those on a memory bandwidth-constrained 93MHz single core processor in 4MB of RAM would be, uh… a challenge.

> We have this massive hits like balatro, vampire survivors, that easily could be made in the era of SNES or N64. But somehow we have to wait 30 years to get them.

> It clearly wasn't technical side of things that prevented that, but also I don't believe it was lack of creativity.

I don't know those specific games, but I think this often happens because, although the thing has been technically possible for decades, it used to be relatively difficult/expensive/obscure, and now it's far more accessible.

In those days, writing and publishing a SNES game was something that relatively very few people would have even thought to attempt, let alone had the knowledge and skills and capital to pull off successfully. Nowadays, creating and publishing a SNES-level game is comparatively very easy (at the technical level, that is; making a good original game is of course still hard), and so a large portion of the people with an idea and some motivation can actually go ahead and do it. And now that games are fully mainstream, there will be more of those people in the first place. Many of the resulting games won't be very interesting, but collectively we're exploring the design space much more quickly.

edit: I was probably silly to focus on literal SNES games instead of 'SNES era' games, but the point still stands: creating games for any platform back then was harder and more obscure than it is now (especially given that we're talking about a technical level that required quite efficient use of the hardware back then, but can be done with extremely inefficient use of the hardware now).

Better machines make it so much easier to experiment. You could make things fast on a SNES or a N64 but you'd have to sweat for it and your code turned into write-only concrete. You don't have to sweat much anymore and your code can easily stay lithe.

Technology is a progression where we learn new things, built on old things.

Game design (like other creative expressions) is the same. Each new game doesn't come from a vacuum, it's a progression from everything that has come before.

More opportunity to write games. It is infitenly easier to get into writing games now than back then.

Also, don't underestimate the "juice" that these days is relatively easy to do but would be expenseive back then. Balatro has dozens of very small things going on graphically that make it feel real nice to play that most certainly not be free on SNES hardware.

And like vampire survivors is just Robotron/Smash TV with infinity number of sprites on screen. The limitation is very much hardware in that case.

I think it's better to say that it wasn't the electronic side of things that prevented that. Game design is technical.

Every board game could have been built thousands of years ago, at least after the dawn of some reasonable writing/drawing media. But technology in design hadn't accumulated enough. To go farther, every bit of math could have been done thousands of years ago, but new math had to draw on earlier math. New math didn't rely (much) on special paper.

Also, "hit" probably isn't a good metric. Those games might have showed up back then and just been moderately notable, like dozens or hundreds of other games were.

The N64 was extremely constrained by its cartridges. If it had a CD-ROM drive, it could have easily won the console wars of its generation, or at least would have gotten ports of many more PS1 games. Probably one of the biggest blunders in gaming business history. Ah well.