SUPER HARD GAMES
Games that challenge us with gruelling difficulty aren’t so difficult to find even today. There’s a very strong audience in the market for that kind of a game, in fact, and titles such as Dark Souls, Cuphead, and the bevy of games Dark Souls has inspired have found a lot of success. But here’s the thing- this is a very particular section of the industry. Back in the 80s, it was more than just a section- it was more or less a norm. Games were hard. Super hard. A lot of it was a holdover of arcade gaming, where games were designed to be hard so players would keep failing and feeding more coins into the machine for another ago. Even beyond plain and simple difficulty though, simple things such as a lack of QoL features made games harder (and at times more frustrating) than they needed to be.
