Many of the older games were, for their simplicity, wonders of engineering. In a handful of kilobytes, the programmers managed to implement the entire game, in a way that ran on the limited hardware of the time. The games were often hand-coded in assembly language, using tricks that are all but lost save to the most obsessive; interleaved instructions, self-modifying code and more; quite a feat.

Not too long ago, amateur computer historians took other machine language programs of note (the original Microsoft BASIC being one), disassembled them by hand, and posted carefully annotated disassemblies online, noting the various interesting features.

I was thinking that the old computer games (such as classic arcade games) would be excellent candidates for such analysis, because of:

a) their historical significance,

b) the aforementioned tightness of the code and hackerly tricks,

c) the unique hardware they ran on. (Some used custom multi-CPU arrangements, for example, with two different 8-bit CPUs handling different tasks. That could be one of the interesting features to look for.)