I had a similar course in college... though we had to build the computer on a breadboard and it was nowhere remotely close to being able to run a GUI let alone Tetris.

For whatever reason there are a lot of people out there trying to dismiss games that try to be grounded in the real world. In my opinion the most interesting games are the ones that mimic reality the most, while getting all the annoying stuff out of the way.

Games like Rust have crafting recipes that downright make fun of reality. You produce complicated fire arms using the most primitive tooling imaginable. "video game logic" is kind of tiring.