The thing that gets me about Dwarf Fortress is that it's a 64-bit text-mode game.
As a grey-haired developer who got excited about "DOS Extenders" that allowed 32-bit mode, seeing a text-mode game written as a native 64-bit application is bizarrely anachronistic.
I get a similar feeling from text-mode GUI frameworks for Rust, which allow multi-threading and 64-bit but are essentially clones of Borland Turbo Vision, where you had to be mindful to keep lists smaller than 64KB: https://github.com/gyscos/cursive
It's a modern game about hacking internals of an 8-bit computer by walking a single bit through it's memory.
Visually it looks like an ASCII roguelike game, but it's actually a niche puzzle game for people who like machine language, assembly and computer internals.
As a grey-haired developer who got excited about "DOS Extenders" that allowed 32-bit mode, seeing a text-mode game written as a native 64-bit application is bizarrely anachronistic.
I get a similar feeling from text-mode GUI frameworks for Rust, which allow multi-threading and 64-bit but are essentially clones of Borland Turbo Vision, where you had to be mindful to keep lists smaller than 64KB: https://github.com/gyscos/cursive