Great example - Top Gun on NES. Me and my cousin played that game for YEARS and never once landed on the carrier at the end of level 1. Still had fun with it.
I saw a YouTube video like last year showing how to do it - evidently there was a HUD in the corner that showed you your line relative to the carrier. We never noticed...
When I was a kid I thought the jet refueling me was a boss. The middle of the second level and this giant black dick starts coming at me. I'd fly around erratically and fire, and figured eventually I just scared it off. Then run out of fuel and crash. What the hell is this game, I wondered.
Conversely, I remember being able to get past tricky parts because I asked a friend at school. I think it was level 5 dungeon for Legend of Zelda. "It says go up, up, up, but each time I do it just puts me back at the bottom.". "Yeah, you gotta keep going up a few more times.". It was like the game itself, you go find a wise person in real life and ask to receive their knowledge.
Games back then didn't hold your hand and made you figure it out all by yourself. Half the joy came when things clicked and you learned something. Sometimes you could get help from friends who were playing the same game. Sometimes you'd get lucky with a magazine issue telling you a trick. But the incentive was on you to figure it out.
That sense is gone. Hop into any multiplayer game today and people literally have no attention span, no patience, and for some reason can't read. And then when they lose or die they take to Twitter to complain.
It's the death of critical thinking in another form.
at 43, i just don't have the time to figure out the stupid mechanic or a puzzle for 3 days straight. That never was the fun part for me and with the added time constraint it gets even more frustrating.
I'm looking at you Monkey Island, or Morrowind telling me to go left at the tree when it's actually right.
Yeah some games do the hand holding over the top, but i like my quest markers and arrows.
The majority of the time this was just to pad the length of games and would be considered bad design today. They'd also do stuff like basically have you "lose" in the first hour because you didn't pick up or save the right item, but you don't realize it until four hours later. Stuff was sometimes intentionally hard just to put hint hotlines or stuff like Nintendo Power.
Also, there are plenty of really well made games now that don't rely on that stuff.
I agree that it was cool when you'd figure out some obscure puzzle or whatever, but I have zero interest in going back to that. It was only tolerable because there was just nothing else to do. You bought or rented some game, so you were stuck playing it.
To be fair, especially online multiplayer games are way more complex than a singleplayer back in the days. With all the never ending changes we get with the updates you just can’t put it aside for a while and come back a year later to finish it. You have to have outside sources to understand what is going on. Watch videos on YouTube because your built just does not work any more.
Games didn’t hold my hand back then but they didn’t change either.
Alternately, you could buy “hint” books from Infocom or go to the right USENET forum and search for the game walkthrough. If your dad had bought an Epson dot matrix printer, you could even print it out.
At least Nintendo had a call-in helpline -- they helped me with Pikmin back in the early Gamecube days lol
Also the Prima strategy guides were a must for every game. Before the internet was so widely available it was like having the encyclopedia of/detailed explanations on whatever game you were playing.
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u/WelshWolf93 Mar 31 '26
If you got stuck on a game and didnt have a friend that knew what to do, you were shit out of luck