Damn, the hostory of this game is fascinating by itself, with the rights management and all that.

Also, it's awesome that the mistaken purchase led to what could be called one of your core games and a nice anecdote you can share with people. I love that for you!

Relating to tech being used to drain the imagination out of games, I feel like it runs even deeper because not only can we put more detail into games as a baseline, but it seems a lot of new games, most of the AAA stuff and some indies, tend to stick to more safe aesthetics, like realism or that one particular type of chunky pixel art.