If you lived in the ancient times, some of the stories that you were told as a child would never be told again, because the storyteller died and nobody else remembered that particular story. Only some stories would be preserved, and be considered to be cultural lore that must be retold to every generation.
A lot of the games made in the 1980s were pretty crap, really. Many were highly derivative of other games. Whole families of games are mostly remembered for their single best entry: for instance, the entire Galaxian series is best remembered for its second entry, Galaga — but Centipede is better remembered than its sequel Millipede, partly because the former shipped for many more platforms.