Note that the game industry avoided C++ for a long time because those early C++ compilers produced code which was very large and quite a lot slower than you'd g

Note that the game industry avoided C++ for a long time because those early C++ compilers produced code which was very large and quite a lot slower than you'd get from C, so C++ was kind of a non-starter when you were writing code for the consoles of the day which had slow processors and only a few megabytes of RAM. You just couldn't afford the overheads of C++ or your competitors would eat your lunch. It wasn't about needing a pioneer to show us that we'd been wrong; we weren't wrong. C++ just wasn't ready for the particular set of requirements that games imposed, yet. Once the state of C++ compilers began dramatically improving in the late 90s (by the criteria of optimisation and executable sizes), most studios moved over to the language pretty quick. Or at least that was my experience.