Actually a lot of games are written in c# these days since that's what most unity developers use (and the other options are even less "lean").
I'd say c or c++ is only really standard in the AAA world, most casual/mobile/indie devs use higher level languages & engines (c#/unity, haxe, as3/flash, lua/corona, etc.)
I agree, that is why I smile every time I see the discussing of language X being too slow for game development, because of GC, bounds checking or whatever one comes up with.
As I am old enough to have lived through a few programming language generations accused of the same performance issues for game development, C included.
That's a "recent" development though :) The original title back in the day were all written in assembly, you really have to squeeze out every single byte and cycle for something like Pokemon or Kirby.
Because softwares are not the only one to use cycles.
For example, in the GB, some memory space is only adressable during a few cycles, and so you have to optimize your code when you wish to update the video ram. If you miss the window, too bad.
