While those quality restrictions apply mostly to demakes, remakes suffer from their own limitations, as Dr. Bogost points out in his 2009 book "Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System."

Inspectors duly detected a slight improvement in air quality, but complaints from shopkeepers and bazaar traders soon became too loud to ignore, and the car restrictions were lifted.

The restrictions older-style games impose on image and sound quality force developers to put more thought into what goes in - and what's left out.