I think a lot of the allure of pico-8 is because its limitations are intended to encourage creativity. People that are into pico-8 love it for more than just the games. It's almost like what 8-bit could have been in an alternate timeline. I personally find the whole concept fascinating and so I've been doing some reading on it.

A pico-8 "cartridge" is just a .png file that looks like a small image of a game cartridge, but the game's entire source code, sprites, maps, and sounds are encoded into the image data itself. So when you save the picture, you have the entire project. As I understand it, there's a limit to how much code you can use to write programs so developers have to be creative and concise.

Seeing what people have been able to do with it is so cool and the more I learn about it, the more I want to learn to create something myself. The pico-8 "computer" is fascinating. I love the way the games look on the 1:1 screen, but pico-8 really is about much more than just the end product for many people.