It's not quite like the old days, but games and game engines frequently require far more math and algorithms than the usual programmer just moving bits between database and screens.

I basically bombed out of the math sequence at linear algebra, at least I gleaned enough to do basic rotations and other matrix math on polygons so I could understand the techniques used by the apis and big boys.

They also need to do performance tuning, and in consoles with uniform hardware, get to optimize code to the hardware to ridiculous degrees. The war stories of games dev in the Atari 2600 up to the playstation 1 are amazing.