I believe The Beatles: Rock Band came the closest to being perfect. Eveything about that game was just beautifully done and the only things missing was Pro Drums, an option for Keys, and a few more Beatle songs (Hey Jude, Strawberry Fields Forever, Yesterday etc. etc.)
If we’re going really old school, then Space Invaders. Its way of leveraging the hardware at the time to make the enemies and music speed up after you defeat more of them is elegant. Back then, the more things a game had on screen, the slower it ran. So, destroying more enemies removes more things from the screen, causing both enemies and music to speed up.
This is something that’s taken for granted today, but I think at the time, it was genius.
I wonder if it was genius, or just a happy accident. They wrote it, realized this happens, and decided it worked better that way.
There’s also the fact that when you beat the original Pac Man, you really beat it. The game would try to accelerate the gameplay beyond what the hardware could do, and the game would break.
Ooof, you may be right, then. I still think older games are neat though
Apparently that speed up was originally a bug https://www.svg.com/293293/details-you-didnt-know-about-space-invaders/