People who play videogames aren't escaping reality, they're simulating having meaningful participation in a society. If anything, gamers crave reality. An example of escaping reality is wearing noise cancelling headphones on the train so no one talks to you. Gamers are trying to simulate a reality where the work they do has tangible meaning. You do this dungeon and you get a new item, which you can use to do new dungeons. In reality, you do a job, and you get a paycheck, which you can only use to continue doing that same job. There are obviously meaningful jobs out there, but many, many people are being denied them, relegated to alienated labor. They are being denied access to community, relegating them to lonliness. The labor in videogames isn't alienating since it's meant to achieve a purpose and meant to advance you and grow your character. Jobs and a lot of what "society" these days has to offer just.... don't do that. It's all about PARTICIPATION.
Basically most of it was bad. The reason it was usually bad was because 3d modeling software needs to have a real graphics card like you'd use for gaming or professional cad work. But this software was destined to be sold to mostly old people using a terrible, 10 year old computer that they're afraid of, so they only rarely use it. So, rather than putting in the more complicated effort to make the software work with different graphics cards, they just would ignore that because the computers it would be used with would be so shitty that they weren't likely to have one anyway.
These days even a basic computer has an onboard graphics card built into the processor, so that's less of an issue, but in the 90s, plenty of software and even games used a software renderer instead of a 3d accelerated renderer. Lego Island is an example of this.
Ah, thank you for the simplified explanation!