Thanks for the insight. I've assumed hand written assembly, except for those parts where you try to squeeze out the last bit of performance, would be structured

Thanks for the insight. I've assumed hand written assembly, except for those parts where you try to squeeze out the last bit of performance, would be structured more like a human would think, but alas I might be wrong. :-) But then again the two games I tried were compiled with Watcom, which according to mmy research was pretty advanced when it comes to optimizations, for its time at least. The biggest turnoff for me was finding the right tooling though. It's not like there are many tutorials for reverse engineering, and those that exist mostly aimed at security research or cracking, targeting modern software. I found that Ghidra was unable to even load a Watcom binary, it crashed. A year later there was a patch for that, but then Ghidra didn't understand the Watcom calling convention. Found some incomplete plugin for this, but it was just blindly marking all functions as Watcom calling convention. Then I gave up. It might not be the best idea to start learning RE with a full blown game, but at the same time, if you wanna do this "for fun", it actually has to have a fun goal.