With those techniques, you could make a game where the graphics were 3D and redrawn from scratch every frame. You also had to keep overdraw low (meaning, each part of the screen was only drawn once or maybe two times). With 34 clocks, you could write a texture mapper (in assembly) that was around 10-15 clocks per pixel (if memory serves) and have a few cycles left over for everything else. memcpy'ing each line of a sprite) so we could beyond 2D mario-like games to 3D ones.
34 clocks was way more than needed for 2D bitblt (e.g. In the 90s we got to the point where you had a pentium processor at 66 Mhz (woo!) At that point your 66Mhz / 320 (height) / 200 (width) / 30 (fps) gave you 34 clocks per pixel.
The led to games like donkey kong where there was a static world and only a few elements updated. So you had to do stuff like only redraw the part of the screen that moved. Before the 90s it was hard to even update all pixels on a 320x200x8bit (i.e. We thought about things in terms of how many instructions per pixel per frame we could afford to spend.
