No, the difficulty of games of that era was just a function of necessity.
Not only did you have hardware limitations, games were deliberately designed to take longer that a typical rental period to beat, the goal being to get kids to either rent it again or have their parents buy it.
So while an arcade game is designed to eat quarters, the console games of the 80’s and 90’s were designed not to be fun so much as they were designed to be too difficult to beat in a weekend.
That’s one thing when it’s a game like Donkey Kong Country, it’s another thing when a platformer is designed to cause a bunch of deaths and game overs with required leaps of faith or whatever.
I do miss renting games, but in hindsight those games often kind of sucked specifically because they were still on the arcade model of difficulty 🤷♂️
Wait, what? The video game rentals had a set level of difficulty that couldn’t be changed in the menu or something?
No, the difficulty of games of that era was just a function of necessity.
Not only did you have hardware limitations, games were deliberately designed to take longer that a typical rental period to beat, the goal being to get kids to either rent it again or have their parents buy it.
So while an arcade game is designed to eat quarters, the console games of the 80’s and 90’s were designed not to be fun so much as they were designed to be too difficult to beat in a weekend.
That’s one thing when it’s a game like Donkey Kong Country, it’s another thing when a platformer is designed to cause a bunch of deaths and game overs with required leaps of faith or whatever.
No. Almost all of them were normal, unmodified retail copies.