Yeah, looking back I would say Turbo Pascal, Turbo C, Turbo Basic and AMOS on Amiga were the Unity of the early 90's game dev on home computers.
Anything that actually required extracting performance out of the system was straight Assembly, which I why it is ironic that new generations think that C compilers were generating fast code since day one.
I also knew a few people that did it like that, to save money on an Assembler.
I also knew a few people who nominally programmedi in Turbo Pascal, but whose code was 70% inline assembly...
And weirdly enough, a few marooned Acorn Archimedes/RiscPC programmers waxing poetic about their ARMs.
(And if there ever was some niche of a "MenuetOS"-like OS, it would probably be for the Raspberry Pi)