Apparently PCS was very well received too, winning awards and having strong sales. Interesting that it has largely disappeared into the mists but Lode Runner is in the pantheon of great early video games.
It reminds me a little of Wizardry vs. Ultima. They were the first two huge RPG franchises, but Wizardry has mostly vanished from the collective consciousness and Ultima had far more staying power.
PCS disappearing when Lode Runner didn't can be explained simply: it played a bad pinball, and it was itself a kind of clone.
The thing PCS did is just one step in a lineage of pinball simulation software, starting with the Atari "Video Pinball" games and progressing through to today's games from Zen(Pinball FX) and Farsight(Pinball Arcade), as well as open source solutions like Visual Pinball. The construction feature was really novel and I used it too as a kid, but it doesn't really exist as a "game design" - it's software first, kind of like flight simulators. Early flight sims aren't very well remembered, although they can have a retro aesthetic appeal. [0]
Lode Runner, on the other hand, is still Lode Runner in all its forms. It isn't a simulation of anything - the game pieces have a concrete, Chess-like logic to them. It's hard to improve upon just by adding "stuff" as the 1994 version did. And the game is easy enough to clone that many people, myself included, played people's clones of it.
Are you kidding me? Everyone who was into computers back in the 80s remembers the chunky look of MFS/Sublogic Flight Simulator 1.0 through 4.0. When Chuck Yeager died, more than one Hackernews remarked of how they discovered him through Chuck Yeager's Advanced Flight Trainer back in the day.
But are the kids rediscovering those specific games? That's the "memory" we're talking about here. Flight simulation was very prominent as a genre in that time, but it barely enters into the coverage of any present-day "history of video games", let alone topping the lists.
That probably has more to do with the fact that "history of video games" style retrospectives skew heavily towards arcade and console releases rather than computer games. If you are into retrocomputing, of course flight sims top the list of the most important titles. There are some systems for which a flight sim was the only graphical game ever officially released. For others, like the IBM PC, flight sims were a benchmark of compatibility in a time when compatibility didn't have a set definition -- vendors who could get the PC releases of MFS and Lotus running on their machines had a pretty solid claim to being "100% IBM compatible". So they are a critical part of the history of the platform.
As for whether "the kids" are rediscovering them, they don't appear in classic game compilations (which, again, skew console-y), but retrocomputing YouTubers like the 8-Bit Guy and LGR rekindle interest in these titles. Inasmuch as young people are interested in classic computers, they will come across these old flight sims.
OTOH, flight sims (especially on 8-bit and early 16-bit platforms) were pretty much the opposite of a "casual game" - you didn't only have to put up with the blocky graphics, you also had to memorize the keyboard layout, be motivated enough to master the steep learning curve etc. So these were pretty divisive games with a lot of die-hard fans, but I guess 80-90% of gamers (me included) would steer well clear of them, or try them once and give up...
Wizardry, like Lode Runner and Spelunker, is a well beloved old favorite in Japan - appearing on PC and consoles.
Lode Runner and Spelunker even have Switch ports.
The people who'd worked on the original Dragon Quest saw Wizardry and were inspired to create a pared down RPG for two buttons and a d-pad consoles
It reminds me a little of Wizardry vs. Ultima. They were the first two huge RPG franchises, but Wizardry has mostly vanished from the collective consciousness and Ultima had far more staying power.