The point is, back then you didn't end up writing nice software because your language was awesomer than other languages. You wrote nice software by escaping to assembly, so support for that was important for state of the art tools.
Yeah, and while both ecosystems allowed for using external and inline Assembly tools, C only had inline assembly keyword (and nothing else beyond that) as part of ISO C89, a couple of years later after 1972, usually it is only pointed out as negative when Pascal based applications reach out to it.
Another thing that usually escapes, is that actually writting cool games on any 16 bit home computers, required the full deck of tricks of Assembly programming, neither C nor Pascal dialect were up to the job, with the first two decades of their existence.
Even arcade systems like Midway Games units, used mostly Assembly, despite their TMS34010 having a C SDK available.
