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Why were many 90's games that were cleary designed for children so hard?

I

iidesuyo

Member
As a child, I used to think I was just bad at playing. But then I was able to beat Zelda III & IV, World of Illusion, Darkwing Duck and many others. But in the age of Youtube, it seems these games were just hard as hell.

Some examples:

Astérix & Obélix (SNES, actually a decent 2 player co-op platformer)
Mickey Mania
Fantasia (Mega Drive/Genesis)
Simpsons Escape from Camp Deadly (Game Boy)
The Smurfs around the World (multiple platforms, one of the last Master System releases)
The Lion King
Tale Spin (NES)
Beethoven 2nd (SNES)
Toy Story

What the heck were the developers thinking? Even adults have problems beating those games. That was not fun as a kid.
 
O

oldmario

Member
the length, if you died over and over half way through it'd take you days or even weeks to beat a game that you can beat in under 2-3 hours
 
W

wtd2009

Member
No idea, only game I there I didn't really have trouble with was lion king. It took a bit of practice but then it was definitely not the hardest game I owned. That belonged to spiderman /x-men. God damn was that game annoyingly hard.
 
I

iidesuyo

Member
Persona7 said:
They did not want people renting the game and beating it in a few days.
Click to expand...

Actually I heard about that rumour too, regarding the Lion King. But when the game becomes so hard that nobody can beat it, fun turns into frustration, and no one wants to play it anyway.
 
I

Inuhanyou

Believes Dragon Quest is a franchise managed by Sony
a hold over from the game design of the 80s which were deliberately made hard by japanese studios as an anti rental measure, which ate into their bottom line. Most times international NA games were significantly harder than the Japanese counterparts
 
D

Dragoon En Regalia

Member
There was hardly any guarantee the average player would end up replaying the game soon after completion, or even at all, so front-loaded difficulty and redundancy made commercial sense. Considering the ease of renting games back then, and the exorbitant costs of packaged releases also, designers had to put aside accessibility or easier difficulty in favor of some resistance to players. Granted, I enjoy the challenge level of older console/PC games, so long as the design's good and ethical. 1CC'ing arcade shooters rarely gets old.
 
V

Vital Tundra

Member
Games back then were soooooo short. Best way to make a game last longer? Make it tough as nails. Kids didn't know any better back then, in fact most didn't. So you have an industry where difficulty was part of the territory. Doubly so for Americans. Like was it necessary to remove cheat codes from Contra???
 
P

Purest 78

Member
Well games weren't very lengthy in most cases back in the day. Most if they were to easy you'd fly right through them. The challenge even if artificial at times was needed.
 
U

UraMallas

Member
Because games were largely modeled on arcade games that 'ate' quarters by ramping up the difficulty. It's one of those things where some developers didn't really know there was another way.
 
E

Estoc

Member
Many games were also arcade games back then, it's logical to think that they did this so they could make you insert credit (1).
 
A

ASaiyan

Banned
oldmario said:
the length, if you died over and over half way through it'd take you days or even weeks to beat a game that you can beat in under 2-3 hours
Click to expand...
This. NES games (and even some 16-bit games) are absurdly short. The brutal difficulty covers that up and dramatically extends the playtime, so you wouldn't feel short-changed by your purchase or just rent it from Blockbuster for the weekend instead.

This seems to have left some people with a difficulty fetish you can see in modern games like Dark Souls, but that's a whole 'nother story, lol.
 
R

rochellepaws

Member
I presume it was because arcades were the templates at the time and arcade games were difficult to encourage more coins on retries.
Also cheats were in virtually every game so there was a mechanism to overcome something very difficult.
 
P

Peltz

Member
I'm struggling to beat Layer Section on Saturn right now with the 4 continues they give you.

(It's perfect like that).
 
D

DJay

Neo Member
A lot of the games were hard because of arcade games. The mentality back when arcades were still around were they were hard to get you to drop quarters in them to keep playing so you could beat the game. The explosion of home consoles helped to change that mindset because nobody was dropping quarters anymore and if your game was too hard nobody would buy it so they started changing the difficulty to make the games more fun (and to appeal to a wider audience).
 
P

PrimeBeef

Member
sn00zer said:
This is the real answer and has been confirmed by devs
Click to expand...
Didn't work with ne. Outside of RPGs, I usually rented 2-3 games on a Friday and returned them Sunday afternoon beaten. There were a few that took a second rental looking at you Silver Surfer, Battletoads, and Ninja Gaiden.
 
F

fluffydelusions

Member
werd
simonsquest-spot3.gif
 
synce

synce

Member
They actually weren't that hard back in the day. But people have gotten so used to games spoonfeeding them everything today that it makes older games seem much harder in comparison.

As an example I barely had any issues with Megaman X as a kid, but I tried playing it not too long ago and had trouble beating more than 1 level
 
P

PSqueak

Banned
Lack of quality control.

Hell, Mickey Mania is on your list, that game had "cheats" that were actually crash screens that would disguise themselves as secret level skips so you'd not notice.
 
R

RedSwirl

Junior Member
That's pretty much what all games were back then. They weren't considered extremely hard by the standards of the time.

1) It was a hold over from 80's arcade game design based on getting people to spend quarters.

2) Games were short, this lengthened them.

3) There weren't as many games being made then, and people couldn't buy as many games, so they tended to have more patience with each individual game.
 
T

Teh Lurv

Member
Persona7 said:
They did not want people renting the game and beating it in a few days.
Click to expand...

Persona nails it. Most 8-bit/16-bit games are only 1-2 hours long if you play them flawlessly. The difficulty was necessary to pad out the gameplay.

In addition to what people said above: Games in the 80s/90s were developed by very small teams by today's standards. It could range from one guy handling a port to the C64 to six or a dozen people working on a 16-bit SNES game. Not like today where a AAA title could have dozens of programmers/artists/sound designers/voice actors/etc.
 
I

iidesuyo

Member
PSqueak said:
Lack of quality control.

Hell, Mickey Mania is on your list, that game had "cheats" that were actually crash screens that would disguise themselves as secret level skips so you'd not notice.
Click to expand...

Please tell me more about that, I remember once having a weird level warp in MM on the Mega CD in stage 1 that I could not reproduce.
 
P

PrimeBeef

Member
Persona7 said:
They did not want people renting the game and beating it in a few days.
Click to expand...
What difference would this make? Dev's didn't see a penny from rentals did they? The rental store still bought the game. Why would it matter if someone lile me spent my $1-3 and beat it that night? I'm not doubting the claims by devs, just wondering why?
 
E

Estoc

Member
PrimeBeef said:
What difference would this make? Dev's didn't see a penny from rentals did they? The rental store still bought the game. Why would it matter if someone lile me spent my $1-3 and beat it that night? I'm not doubting the claims by devs, just wondering why?
Click to expand...

Because a rental copy is not one to one, it's one to many. Of course, it's not that simple, these could be people who would have otherwise not tried the game due to time and/or money, but I can see how they felt it was something need combatting against through designs.
 
P

PrimeBeef

Member
Estoc said:
Because a rental copy is not one to one, it's one to many. Of course, it's not that simple, these could be people who would have otherwise not tried the game due to time and/or money, but I can see how they felt it was something need combatting against through designs.
Click to expand...
I still don't see why devs would be concerned with rentals, unless it was to artifically make games hard so someone would decide to purchase i stead of re-renting over and over again?

All I can say is I'm glad my rental place rented games for $1 dollar per day. Made it easy to return games the same night and get somerhing else if I beat one early.
 
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