Just a guess: it is a lot easier to focus upon making a game using a fantasy console than it is to use hardware. Using something like a Pi Pico means building o

Just a guess: it is a lot easier to focus upon making a game using a fantasy console than it is to use hardware. Using something like a Pi Pico means building out the hardware or buying into a non-standard board that provides suitable I/O capabilities. From my meager experience with fantasy consoles, they also provide a development environment that is more similar to an 80's vintage computer than you would get with a microcontroller. (While it is easy to setup a development environment on a Pi Pico if you follow the instructions, it is rather involved.) That's not to say it can't be done. I have seen demos using everything from custom code and circuits using an ATtiny to people using VGA libraries on higher performance microcontrollers, but that's not everyone's cup of tea and would likely be hard to implement around a game jam.