Those were just "I wonder if I could do this" type of projects. Either that, or I saw a different version somewhere and wanted to see if I could do it better. I look back and shake my head at some of the code I see in those pages.
Interesting fact: the gopher game was featured in some german computer magazine.
However, Flash is probably the language of choice for games these days. Graphics are easily manipulated (rotation, vectors, etc), and they resize cleaner.