Interesting! He says he got by mostly with high school math. That analytical solutions are used more in physics simulations. But that in general if you time slice enough, simple approaches work well enough.
When I was 10, I had the opposite reaction. I started writing a game, but having a busy loop just constantly figuring out inputs and updating state seemed so ugly, I gave up, figuring I obviously lacked some knowledge. After all, I couldn't write a space invaders game without "brute forcing" it. Later when I found out that's actually how pros do it, I was really disappointed.
GW-BASIC in 89 or so. I don't think you could sleep. And I didn't have much of a concept of frame either. I just thought frames were arbitrary decisions in time to look at the exact state of the world and show it. Like, that you had a bunch of equations that told you where objects would be at any given time, and when they'd do something interesting (like collide). So naturally my little loop felt stupid and I figured once I went to high school or university they'd tell me what I was missing (hah!).
Had I known that everyone else was just making up approximations, and that a lot of things don't even have analytical solutions would have been nice to know.
Those days your CPU would be doing mostly 1 thing, like run your game, so the concept of sleep wasn't needed and actually, usually you didn't have time to sleep even if you could, you would need every cycle to do calculations. To make life a bit easier and by using C/asm, you could offload something like game music by setting an interrupt vector so it would keep playing nicely without you doing all kinds of timing madness. I was using a lot more math back then than now; there are libraries for everything and they hide the math for you. You could find physic approximations (very rough! it only had to look plausible, not realistic) in books and BBSs BUT you could never just use them as you didn't have enough cycles for that, you needed to rewrite them to fit your purpose otherwise your software would be unusably slow.
When I was 10, I had the opposite reaction. I started writing a game, but having a busy loop just constantly figuring out inputs and updating state seemed so ugly, I gave up, figuring I obviously lacked some knowledge. After all, I couldn't write a space invaders game without "brute forcing" it. Later when I found out that's actually how pros do it, I was really disappointed.