Though on the Apple II, I suspect that most games were essentially double buffered (although there is no video hardware to speak of). I wrote an arcade game when I was in high school (probably around 1985???) and the advice I got was to draw into a separate piece of memory and then copy that memory into the video memory -- otherwise you'd always have trouble with video artefacts (especially because the colour it output was dependent upon the bit patterns in memory).

It was actually important from another aspect: the video memory was not contiguous. IIRC, it was divided in 3. So the first row was the first scan line, the second row was 1/3 the way down the page and the third row was 2/3 down the page. In order to compose graphics on the screen, you'd have to have this weird algorithm for drawing into memory. Compositing right in the video memory would have resulted in lots of timing problems.