Modern games start you off with a tutorial, a gazillion hints, arrows pointing you in the right direction, and epic loot gift-wrapped after just two fights. Meanwhile, the 90s:

The reason is mass market. In the 80s and early 90s, gamers were a small, tech-savvy crowd. As the market grew, publishers aimed for everyone, and Nintendo said it openly with the Wii. Simple and inclusive won, even if the original gamers got left behind. Same story for computers (Windows 95/XP turned the PC into a black box) and for music.

Very good point. I guess in the end it's a number game. Please the hardcore gamer nerds or please 1000x more casual gamers. Easy call I guess.

What a movie!

Largely telling a true story!

Yep, pretty nuts actually. We always only see the tip of the iceberg on many things…

The instant gratification generation today wouldn’t last 2 minutes in the 90s.

God damn that level was brutal, I don’t think I ever beat it.

Neither did I. Did you play the prequels too on the NES?

Yes, but I sucked so bad I never really got that into them compared to the SNES version. I could never even cross the bridge at the very beginning and always ended up in the water. Without using that cheat that gave you 30 lives, I lasted 30 seconds.

Finished this many many times, the first win took a long time but they came easier after that.

Thats how the game Silkworm was for me on the Amiga. Super hard but then once I had beating it in coop mode with my brother we beat it everytime now. That initial hump :)

They usually had manuals to read before playing

Reading... what a waste of time, right? 😂

When I play some retro RPG, I have to remember myself to allocate some time to read the manual first... sometimes I boot one up and go: "Wait, what I'm supposed to do now?"

Yep. I must have read the manual for Wizardry 7 a million times by now, love it every time!

Wasn't one of the main reasons for high difficulty in older 1990s games because of the low data capacity in cartridges of the time? There wasn't that much space to store ingame content, and so developers made games hard to beat to take up more time.

Mass Effect 2, 1990 edition.

Seeing this thing for the first time was shocking. It took me forever to get trough the 6 levels but then i was just like 9 years old 😂

The fact that you even got to that level at that age is quite impressive :)

we got like 2 or 3 games a year so there was more than enough time to practice. we played these 6 levels for months

did you magically forget they expected us to read the instruction manual? :P

Difficulty is content. Amazing, challenging gameplay is content, I‘d rather have that instead of the 100+ hour games we get now with „content“ just for the sake of inflating the number of hours taken to beat it so ign says „it took me blabla hours to beat the game!“ 🤦‍♂️

this game was so awesome. (and is still awesome)

This is the better version

Probably one of the greatest bosses of all time

CONGRATULATIONS ACHIEVEMENT UNLOCKED DING DING YOU COMPLETED THE NEW PLAYER TUTORIAL HERE IS 500G TO GET YOU STARTED HERO!

Games in 2026: let meeew heewwlp uuu Games in the 90: Here's an ass load of pixels, deal with it

This was NOT how you got started in this game. This scene is level 3 if I recall correctly. Now, on hardest difficulty, even level 1 doesn’t hold back. But still.

that was like the 3rd or 4th level IIRC. Contra 3 was great

I beat this at hard difficulty. Think this is rough? Play a Nintendo-hard 80s game like Battletoads. Game rage like you’ve never felt before.

I could beat this game wo a ko or close. I beat it many times. My friend loved to steal my lives, throw a super bomb, die immediately and say,"I'm helping." For a bunch of lives if you need em: Anthill boss. Press down til you're at the bottom. Now place a weight on shoot. Go do something like sleep and come back later.

That game cost $50 in the early 90's and took about 45 minutes to beat. That's about $150 today with inflation for a game with less than hour of gameplay. I'll take today's $30 comparable games with 15-20 hours of gameplay.

If you beat that game in a single session of 45 minutes you're pretty OP.

Realistically, nobody's picking up this game and beating it right out of the gate, but that doesn't change the amount of stages or actual gameplay.

I quit more games to never get back to them because of boring tutorials or early sections or extremely long cutscenes or dialogues than for any other reason. When I click on "play" I want to "play". You don't give people a ball and then prevent them from playing with it until you explain all the ways you can play with it. And if your gameplay isn't intuitive anyway, it's a failure. Castlevania figured that out decades ago. Then went back on it xD

Contra 3.. greatest game ever

Now show the dozens of hours dying trying to stay alive long enough to learn the pattern

Ok to be fair, Contra 3 was seen as super fucking hard, even in it's day.

It is a tutorial still, just not an obvious one, as it's showing you that you'll need to climb around to avoid certain enemy attacks. Developers have largely forgotten how to teach through gameplay.

Better days indeed

Such a great game, idc what anyone says I liked the top down maze levels. Me and David cleared this over a weekend playing co op.

New games are for EvErYoNe!!!

I played as robots instead of having Bill and Lance. Probotector FTW!

This isn’t even on hard to achieve the real ending 😂

Ok but this is the third stage of that game

This was a very stressful time for kids. Sweaty palms playing this

Have you ever played a Souls ?