For Pico-8, closed-ness is a feature: the author is known to hide secret easter-egg features in updates eventually get discovered and unearthed over time. Parts

For Pico-8, closed-ness is a feature: the author is known to hide secret easter-egg features in updates eventually get discovered and unearthed over time. Parts of the memory map are still unknown, and people will figure out new "pokes" that will save you some tokens or cycles... then someone takes that and does something nuts with the undocumented features. If it were open source, and community-driven then by now Pico8 would just be a regular old game framework: features would get added and added until it was just like any other game library. As it stands, the secret-ness of the code is a big part of the fun. Figuring out how to push the limitations and looking for sneaky ways to do new things. It feels like exploring and trying to master the early 8bit computers back in the day. That's the "fantasy" part! That's why I call Pico-8 a fantasy console, and the knock-offs are just "feature-limited game libraries"!