The BIOS has a lot of built in traps that, while minimalistic, make all PCs appear the same to you, the trap-user. This is the bare minimum to load an OS + drivers from disk, or run an OS installer, or turn your PC into a flappy bird arcade machine.

Come to think of it, "bare metal" would really be modifying your BIOS to contain flappy bird. Then you could draw to the screen directly. Too bad it would only work on one model of motherboard. :)