As he says in the linked tweet: the major value the GPL contributed is the code being open-sourced in the first place, since his co-copyright-holders would never have agreed to license it BSD. The alternative to the GPL, in this case, was "(c) All Rights Reserved", which is still how most other old games are licensed.
GPL lets you release source code and enforce that no one can modify it without releasing their modifications. A lot of people like that "restriction" because it maximizes the amount of source people have access to.