> "When games were new, they wanted a lot from you; daunting you, taunting you, resetting and delaying you. Players played stoically. Now everyone’s turned off by that."
Most old games had a very short gameplay, single digit hours. They had to be challenging by any means so the player gets their money's worth.
It blows my mind to go back and look up how long some games such as Sonic 2 actually took, compared to the amount of time I spent failing to complete it in my youth.
I remember taking forever to finish the 1993 version of The Punisher on an arcade machine, and never managed at all for the 1991 NES version, only to finish them in probably 1h in an emulator with about a bazillion coins/retries :).
Yeah I played Grim Fandango with a guide and clocked something like 8 hours.
There was also the conspiracy that publishers made a lot of money with selling strategy guides back in the days.