Yeah, or you could just play candy crush on your phone. There's always going to be a cool level of dorky absorption that's great as a learning opportunity and obsession for people so inclined.

In order to run multiple games, you need quite a bit of memory, either, say, a bare minimum of 32KiB to load into, or several times that in flash for them. RAM requirements aren't tiny, e.g. I'd guess more 1KiB, although I don't know this architecture (my "Infocom" experience is mostly with original Zork running on MIT-DM, a KA10 PDP-10, using a general purpose MDL language, although I only looked at code, didn't try to write any).

Does that bump the price of the required micro-controller up beyond $2?

It that a silly question in almost 2014 with Moore's Law still in effect ^_^?

This'll easily do it for $2.13 -- 256 KB FLASH + 32 KB RAM on a 40 MHz 32-bit ARM processor. http://www.digikey.com/product-detail/en/MB9AF314LAPMC1-G-JN...

Microcontroller RAM is expensive, but FPGA RAM is even more-so.