Another good game is to try and make Tetris - that was my first, and illustrates the author's point pretty well: a game is more than just the small bit the player sees, but rather a whole host of orchestration to get to that point. Though I'd argue game makers should use HTML5 or something like Unity these days rather than writing their own engine :)

I made a single-player "squash" pong in about an hour in HTML, CSS and Javascript but that's just the paddle and bouncing. The author has a very good point that could probably be rephrased like this: Making a complete end-user program may require quite lot of studying, planning, wrong choices, rewriting, testing etc. It takes time.

I find this to be a really good reality check for new game programmers. It's a really simple game to make but most new people are still surprised at how complex it is to actually do.