this post was submitted on 16 Aug 2025
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God I tried. And it told me a lot out myself.
The VAST majority of that old stuff, the stuff that I remember so fondly, was only fun because it was the best we had.
My first game was Yars Revenge. By today's standards, it's about 30 seconds of entertainment.
Even Super Mario Brothers, the pinnacle of games for years, had no save button and you have to pull off a long series of perfect play with only a couple of lives or get sent back to level 1. It was almost all single player taking turns.
Compared to even old current systems, there's just no draw there and there's no social aspects for them.
I think you're missing a large piece of the puzzle here.
back between the 70s-90s you played games with friends in the room. you would mock and challenge each other to do better. That was the game.
ᵃⁿᵈ ʸᵒᵘ ʲᵘˢᵗ ˡᵒˢᵗ ᶦᵗ
Sounds like something someone who had friends growing up would say
I didn't have any friends, but I had siblings.
thanks for making me lose the game 😠
Maybe the original has this issue of being held back by overly punishing arcade inspired design, but I replayed Super Mario World recently and I think it holds up in this respect. You only need to get past the next checkpoint for your progress to be saved, and if you are running low on lives and don't want to lose progress, there is the option of going back to previous levels to farm more lives and powerups. There are also semi-secret areas with buttons that put extra blocks into every level that make the game easier. For basically the first half of the game the only thing that's really required to win is a small amount of impulse control, planning and patience, and it seems to deliberately work to teach you that stuff in various ways.
My kid is almost 6 so he doesn't really know modern games. For now he is totally into lemmings and the incredible machine 2. It's fun because I played those games a lot and can easily help him when he is stuck.