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.