I've never actually published anything of my own, besides posting it on the Internet - but in that sense, Blockage was the first game I released in that way, last year. I've arrived at my 320x200 mode 13h assembly language paradigm since I started working on DirectX applications for my day job. If I set out to write the best game I could by today's standards it would be 3D for sure, written in C++, requiring the very latest graphics hardware, probably shipping on DVD, only running on a handful of high-end computers, and the product of several full-time years of work. That's impossible in what spare time I have, so instead I aim much lower - to knock up some games in only a few hours each, that are reasonably OK, run on most PCs, and take up less space than a typical texture.
