Yes, but you weren't doing things like _Elite_ in these sorts of special-purpose VMs. Aside from the portability issue (extremely important when platforms had the lifespan of mayflies back then as Moore's law blazed along full speed), VMs also got you compression. A full compiled binary might be exorbitantly expensive in disk/tape space, not to mention RAM. But a very small VM could make a custom-tailored language to interpret on the fly, and save a ton of space where you needed to sweat every kilobyte. (Think about the different in size between `print "Hello world!"` and the default compiled binary.) It didn't matter how fast your text adventure ran if it couldn't fit in X kb of space.