Writing stuff in assembly is not hard, especially not in those days when x86 instruction set was simpler/smaller. Neither the tooling were terrible, in fact, a

Writing stuff in assembly is not hard, especially not in those days when x86 instruction set was simpler/smaller. Neither the tooling were terrible, in fact, arguably the opposite. Some of the best dev tools ever made come from that era (Borland stuff) People still write a lot of asset creation tools today. That's standard in games industry.