The production cost was high since they wrote it directly in assembly and/or C and used very few external libraries. It was code golfing everyday and you couldn

The production cost was high since they wrote it directly in assembly and/or C and used very few external libraries. It was code golfing everyday and you couldn't afford many bugs since rolling out patches was a huge pain. So you truly needed rockstar programmers to pull it off. (The closest equivalent today would be custom embedded firmware - not cheap.) In terms of value, I'm pretty sure 30 years from now they'll laugh at the quality of today's UI and what we pay for it. For the time they had quite adequate graphics considering they were competing with arcade games and playing cards. Also IIRC they ran pretty fast on less hardware than you get in a coffee machine today.