Interesting to think about how imagination when playing video games has changed. Back in the day when the Atari and probably NES were current, people were probably expected to put some work in when playing games, probably imagining something closer to the what's on the boxart as what's "actually" happening in the game world and that the things on the TV screen are just a representation. Pong is a tennis match and Asteroids is a ship in space. But now, when retro pixel art is seen as a distinct aesthetic in its own right, people think about what's happening in these games much more literally even if they know the proper context for them. Pong is two rectangles and a square and Asteroids is a triangle and some weird circles.
