i think you had to be alive when they were released to appreciate them. If someone were to play them now OMG they are terrible. I suppose it is really difficult for anyone today to really realize what sort of extremely limited technology we were dealing with at the time.
It was just so incredible to 12-year old me but honestly , if i were to emulate the game tonight i am absolutely certain i would switch it off in 2 minutes.
I was actually alive back then... I did see pictures of the game on C64, but I don't think that I was very interested in the game back then; I have learnt about a lot of console games over the years, especially as I was pretty much exclusively C64 and PC (excepting the odd bit of Game Boy) until about 1997, when I got into emulation (I was 14 then), because I wanted to learn about the history of the older Final Fantasy games before VII (which was coming out on the PC), although ironically, at the time I saw TV ads for it when it was coming to PS1, I scoffed dismissively at them!
In any case, I'm for most intents and purposes a gaming historian and an amateur ludologist, so I try to learn as much about games as I can, as well as the tech surrounding them, because that helps contextualise the decisions made with a particular game at the time!