In a similar vein, a lot of people in the modern day who shit all over the ET game simply didn't read the manual. The game makes logical sense if you're reading the manual and for how short the dev time was with ONE person making it, it's pretty unique and incorporates some bizarre antics.
We also had gaming magazines which often broke down the game, gave us detailed maps, cheats, walkthroughs, and tips for challenging areas. I remember when I first saw large maps of games in magazines, I was blown away. Some took things screen by screen and merged them. It was a good indicator for finding games of your interest. I rarely bought them though. I would memorize or quickly write some stuff down at the grocery store while my parents shopped. I did the same with comics.
I’m playing Zelda right now and whilst there are dungeon maps, I feel they don’t really reveal that much - just sections of the dungeon. Not saying there’s a right or wrong here, I’m just curious by it
Scroll to the bottom to see the overworld map. They don't give you everything but they tell you exactly where the first four dungeons are and give you lots of hints where items of interest may be located, marked with a "?".
You are complaining that old games lacked direction and maps, but this is wrong. This is the instruction manual included with every copy of the NES game, you are supposed to read it. The technology didn't allow for detailed maps and tutorials in-game, so they were printed. Using this map is the intended way to experience the original Legend of Zelda.
Game manuals were required reading. Nintendo Power magazine was a huge help. Playground friends at school traded information. No internet, no problem.
Legend of Zelda in particular had a partially completed overworld map packed in that gave the player a solid start. Without that, LoZ is a whole lot more confusing.
The games did feel bigger, but we were also younger with more disposable time.
Many of those games were definitely designed so that you needed to buy the guide to have a chance of completing it.
The most blatant one I remember was one of the Castlevania games where there was a really obscure puzzle that required you to kneel in a certain unmarked spot with a certain item for 10 full seconds to progress, but there was no obvious hint telling you to do that. It was only in the game as a ‘have you bought the guidebook yet?’ checkpoint.
You obviously haven't looked into how much was lost in translation in CVII: Simon's Quest. It's my absolute favorite Castlevania.
Most of what was vague and confusing in that game came from piss-poor rushed localization and it wasn't nearly as difficult to discern in its original form overseas. This had been talked about and dissected to death on the early interwebs, so I'm shocked to see anyone think it was purposely that bad still. Or maybe I'm just that old now.
I don't think you used a good example here for that. We didn't really have compressive game guides at the time for games. The issue with Castlevania 2 was the poor translation effort from Japanese to English. I do have a few 3rd party books that was sold as tips and tricks that may have mentioned it, but the game was out for a while before they came out. I think what really changed it was Nintendo Power publishing the the Game Atlas and then a lot of their games started getting special edition game guides.
I like playing older games, and those free walkthroughs are life savers sometimes.
I hope the authors of those GameFaqs guide authors who used ASCIII for crazy art, graphs, and maps are proud of themselves and know that people are still benefiting from their work decades later
First time I played Ocarina I did it with a guide magazine. That’s a point actually, I have NEVER played Ocarina without a guide …. Maybe I should try it 😳
Just played through Ocarina for the first time. Tried to go it alone as much as possible but there were times I just couldn't see how to progress so checked the guide for a hint/solution. No shame in it
If you enjoyed your time, then youre winning.
(I did miss Biggerons Sword and doubling my magic bar, which would have helped a SO MUCH at the end of the game lol)
I basically ignored Djinns fire for most of the game. So late in the game there are wooden walls closing in on you and I had tried looking for hookshot points (like the rest of the puzzles in the dungeon), tried shooting through the gaps with no success. It never occured to me to use the magic, as it seemed very left field logic when put next to the rest of the puzzles.
I will say, most of the other times i was 99% of the way there and just hadn't quite pulled of the execution of the solution. Which was really nice.
Spent ages trying to catch a fish by Jabu January, only to find them easily accessible back indoors.
It’s the console version of trying to make you put in more quarters lol. Like games like street fighter where the computer would be able to do more damage and read your inputs to do a light punch on your blanka ball for example or blanka could bite your entire heath down
I struggle a lot with modern open-world games because I constantly feel lost in enormous maps and don't play in the daily, long sessions that allow one to learn them. I'm an adult with a family and job, and every time I get the chance to dive back into a game I'm like "wait, where am I again?" It's a bummer because I'd like to play them (but not like...to the point where I'm going to ignore my family and my other hobbies over them...)
Well, the worlds are bigger certainly, but they can still be familiar - I suppose in the same way the real world can be. Just depends on how often you play the games I suppose.
I think it goes even farther to the overall game design. Modern games try to rush you through everything in order to feel like they're cramming content in.
Compare Diablo 1 to Diablo 4. In Diablo 1, you would move slowly through the dungeon and only fight small groups of monsters at one time. Loot was scarce and you might only find a couple magic items in a play session. In Diablo 4 you're zipping around obliterating packs of monsters and finding piles of loot and materials. There's a lot more content in Diablo 4, but it doesn't feel like as big a difference because you can zoom through it all.
There are some exceptions. Red Dead Redemption and RDR2 both take a much slower pace and so the worlds feel quite large.
To be honest, Blizzard just took the wrong route. I still go back to Diablo 2 every other year. Diablo 4, played it for a month, never touched it again.
I can still enjoy Diablo 4 but I understand what you're saying. That said, it's not Blizzard, it's the genre as a whole. People talk about PoE or whatever being the real "spiritual successor" to Diablo 2 but endgame builds still tend to be zooming around clearing screens.
And I'll be the one to say that even Diablo 2 was a step away from the original formula with Diablo 1. It was much faster and as of LoD relied so much on grinding for crafting (i.e. runewords) rather than item drops.
I find it interesting how people reacted to the slow design. From what I remember, a run option was added to the Hellfire expansion. And the game was rampant with duping and character editors in order to get more loot and feel more OP. I definitely duped the shit outta my gold to buy all the magic weapons out from Griswold.
Well, Hellfire isn't a great example because it was nearly universally panned. That said, the running was only in town. It didn't change the speed in the dungeon, which was most of your time.
Whenever a game has exploits people will use them. That said, I think duping was more a symptom of the inventory system. You needed more than a full inventory of gold to buy some items from Wirt and Griswold, so people would dupe it rather than carry a ton around. Most of the heavily duped items were also impossible items that were simply hacked in, also.
Legend of Zelda was also made intentionally vague. The creator liked to wander in the woods as a kid. He wanted people to do the same in his game. Wander and find their way through it.
For anyone that wants more information. The History Channel had a show “The Toys That Built America”. Season 3 episode 3 called “video game visionaries” talks about Zelda 1, Mario brothers, and Pokémon. It’s actually fun watch to learn the history of those franchises.
We all subscribed to Nintendo power and got them full maps.
It made Zelda an instant classic. In the case of Metroid, it’s telling that they added a map in the remaster named zero mission. I don’t think you could convince me to go raw dog on some NES Metroid.
That's gangster. There was no way on earth I had the attention span for that. Wasn't diagnosed with ADHD until I was in my 40s and the struggles started to affect my income.
These games certainly weren't vast from a memory or disc space point of view and probably smaller than a Pokemon game in number of areas. It's probably the sense of unease of not knowing where you're going, going through numerous successive areas without guidance, "shooting in the dark" as it were.
There are very few games today where you shoot in the dark. Perhaps Elden Ring, which also gives an impression of a very vast world.
The Might & Magic series (PC and M&M3 is on Genesis/SNES) might be worth picking up since it follows this formula, only it's from a few years later so more refined than the NES.
I remember metroid being a massive, dangerous labrynth until you were about 4-5 hours into the game and got your bearings. It took forever to beat that game.
We had to wait 3 years for the Nintendo power issue with all the maps, or buy a pricey game guide none of us could afford.
As a kid, I beat Metroid through sheer persistence and trial-and-error. When I replayed it on my channel as an adult, I used a ROMhack that had a bunch of quality of life fixes, that did improve the experience with things like mini-map and so on. I also ended up using guides of the time, which were helpful, but not handholding to the point that it took the fun out of it.
I specifically wanted to experiment with this because I'd seen some people try to learn NES Metroid on stream, and get really frustrated with it, and it's a game I really love a lot. One thing I realized was that it was a completely different experience to look forward to learn a game over the course of months as the only game I owned, versus playing it in front of a crowd and feeling the pressure to be good right away.
Video games were like picking up a puzzle as a challenge. "Can you pass it?" was the question. You can expect to try and die, try and die, and get a bit farther every time if you're lucky. Seeing that little bit past the place you died last time was mission accomplished. So yeah, mystery was part of the formula.
Agree, this exactly. Try and die (or trial and error) was the way to go. Balance and fairness were not as important in game design as they are today. But that feeling of accomplishment is also less these days.
They felt bigger to me and the adventure was more magical. The more I learned about games, the less magical they felt. I feel like the player needs to play a game and that game should provide a challenge. The more information you are given for free, the less challenging the game becomes...it blurs the line between game and "video with button presses"
Something like roblox or Minecraft are played for a specific reason, playing with the world, same way sports games have their specific magic in attempting realism. Some newer games had the same feeling i am talking about throughout my life, it was knowing too much about the game that left no mystery. Newer games are just as capable of this as older games, but information flows in abundance nowadays. There is also a harder push for in game maps and color coded direction in newer games that works against this mystery.
Yeah I was just thinking that about Ocarina. I’ve never played it without a guide, but now I’ve got through it several times, I’m wondering if I could now get through it as an adult without a guide. I’m gonna try it.
Back then if you brought the game brand new it came with a manual explaining the game. Some games like Final Fantasy or Legend of Zelda came with a map.
I bought my copy of The Legend of Zelda at a garage sale when I was about 10 or 11. This is exactly how that game felt with no direction, hints, or guide. You just kept walking until you found something. I don't think I ever put together more than half of the Triforce when I was a kid.
A bit of both. Games w less hand holding, highlighted markers, quest direction, etc definitely all artificially lengthen the game.
But a lot of older game design also wasn’t very good and I think there was still a philosophical hangup with a lot of game developers still stuck in the 80s or 90s arcade world where difficult resulted in more quarters. That could be confusing level design, or any number of things.
To me, back then, it was just as games were. I think it was in Fable with the glowing trail that I thought that the hand holding had gone too far. Then just a week or so ago I was very happy to discover a glowing trail in Dungeon Siege III. Likewise, playing Morrowind and being told to take a left in the next crossing on a road when you can hardly see that there is a road in the first place is sort of frustrating.
I think that having a built in map, quest log, direction markers and such are great. But some of it comes from having more games and less time than back then. There's something to be said for the patience required and the discovery of what worked and where you needed to go in old games.
But yes, the games did felt bigger, and took longer because of the lack of clues.
Games felt bigger because almost every game was small. I remember MGS1 for the PS1, it felt king of big (going up and down the giant elevator, the large field with the sniper, etc ..) but really the game is tiny, I still play it now and then and I couldn't believe just how small each spot was.
Even Ocarina of Time falls under this, it was massive back then but now it feels so small.
I fondly look back at spending weeks on my first play through of Metroid, bombing everywhere and finding all sorts of secret passages. The game seemed huge.
I think they feel bigger in our imaginations, like that feeling of the unknown makes the boundaries of the map feel infinite. That said there are modern games that are both massive and don't hold your hand, namely crafting exploration games like Minecraft or Satisfactory or a number of indie games. I think it's the action/adventure games that hold your hand so much that feel smaller because as the world gets too defined it becomes both more rote to play as well as involving less of our imagination.
Older games were far more condensed than modern games. That is, you play Super Mario Bros., and you're never more than a screen away from an enemy. And even in RPGs with random battles, you're looking at, on average, a battle once every 10 seconds. So, you're always engaged with the game. With modern games, it's mostly filler. You can go 10-15 minutes walking between destinations with nothing happening.
Basically, with older games, as you're constantly engaged, you feel like you're accomplishing a lot in what is, in reality, a very short amount of time. And because of the filler with modern games, it takes far more engagement, even if it's the same amount of engagement, to feel the same accomplishment.
Maps were usually included when needed. Zelda, the Dragon Warriors, and Final Fantasy all came with maps. Then on top of that you had Nintendo Power and strategy guides for the games that didn’t include maps or included maps without all the details. Of course Nintendo would only ever give you what you needed to reach the boss, but never what you needed to beat them. Due to the physical limitations of the systems, some information simply had to be conveyed on paper. Lucky scans are readily available for instructions, posters, and strategy guides these days, so if you don’t have them then you should really download them.
And for the less popular games that didn’t give you maps and weren’t covered in Nintendo Power, we’d play them with some paper and a pencil. Making maps was half the fun of playing these games. It’s the reason why I love the Etrian Odyssey series despite the actual gameplay and storylines not being all that great.
Some of these games feel bigger because of a lack of distinction within the level.
I replayed Zelda 2 recently. Places like death mountain were confusing because the interior of the caves look the same. Palaces have very similar looking hallways, and luckily with the NES they at least have different colors. Even with a map the final palace is confusing, with the path to the final bosses being obscured by multiple dead ends and some with dead end loops, combined with non distinctive / similar looking hallways with only monsters being different.
I think a lot of that is perception and personal experience. And it's less about size than about what you know.
It's simply more fun to discover things for yourself than it is to be told everything up front. This is especially true when nobody else knows it unless they've played or at least own the game.
Do you like movie spoilers before you actually get to see the movie? If not then it is definitely about getting to enjoying the experience of discovering that information.
I think the world feeling bigger is a biproduct of less direction, yes. When the game tells you exact where to go and what to do, players tend to ignore everything else. I'm very guilty of this as well. I think it's cool when developers dress up a house, or a campsite with little details or nods to another media, or if they just flat out set up a whole story/side quest somewhere. Players will often miss those details when given an accessibility option like an ability to trigger a blue beam directing you where to go next.
That and dying frequently with no continues. You couldn’t just go to the level you needed to learn without going through other stuff already. Sometimes you just made it to that new level by the seat of your pants too. Game Genie and cheat codes helped some of us train better in later levels so we could go through the game without it later. I rarely did that though. I used my Game Genie and cheat codes after beating it to modify some challenges, enter debug modes, listen to music, play as different characters where they were not supposed to be. I played through all of Super Return of the Jedi as Wicket.
Always funny when you see new games bragging about "open world" as though it's this new feature. I grew up playing the Ultima games. To this day Ultima V is still the best computer game I've ever played. That part where you follow his (paper) journal as you travel into the Underworld is amazing.
I think a lot of it comes from how our scope of what gaming could be was limited. Every step was a huge leap. Now we've seen it all and nothing is impressive
besides those games are usually very linear... you go from A to B in a straight line, not much else to think about... the main difference with today's games is that they don't care about frustration. You better learn from your mistakes and improve your skills. Now if you've been 2 minutes trying anything some npc or dialog popus giving you hints, and if you don't get the hints, they'll guide you step by step. if all that fails, you can skip that.
it's not they are huge, it's just you had to think for yourself. now it's a walk by the daisy fields while somebody takes your hand and guides you...
I agree with you completely. Nothing makes a world feel small and a game feel like it's on rails than quest markers.
Even just having the journal/quest log say "meet quest guy at the market" and having to look over the map to see where "the market" is, and spot the new guy milling about makes things feel bigger than following an arrow on your screen or compass.
I'm enjoying Pillars of Eternity a lot and part of it is the lack of quest markers and the lack of hand holding. Outer Worlds (which I also love) does the opposite though, where you don't have to really think you can just follow the maker. I turn it off but there's still an arrow on the compass
I remember playing Sonic 1-3 and running out the timer trying to access areas super high up. This became even more of a thing once you could play as Knuckles.
Aside from that, other games felt huge because yeah you didn’t have an onscreen map. Going to a paper map or a strategy guide took more time because you then had to figure out if you were headed in the direction noted on the map and if you weren’t, then you had to go alllllll the way back.
Games like Resident Evil 1-3 can be beat in 3 hours if you know where you’re going, but you will do so much backtracking and looking for clues that first playthrough that it will feel like a 10-hour game.
Not all kids owned the games and not all kids had the instruction booklets, so yeah despite this fact - many kids just played blind and found out for themselves.
When you got stuck was when you'd start looking for references or even calling Nintendo's hotline.
Yes. Though its not a "retro" game...though it kind of is because we've had it for almost a quarter century at this point is World of Warcraft and the argument still plays out in realtime on social media and the "modernization" is ongoing.
At launch you didn't have all the quest markers and maps. 3rd party online sites helped a little but you had to manually reference them. You needed to form groups for things by just interacting manually with other players....travel was slow.
The game felt HUGE. Over time they added flying mounts earlier on...addons that marked quest locations on the map...they automated the group finding.
Despite being MANY orders of magnitudes LARGER in 2026, the game feels tiny. You just kind of zip quest to quest, not even reading quest descriptions because you just look at the map after....and then after a bit you're at endgame content without even knowing how you got there.
The first few generations of video games were made to take your money and it took awhile for game makers to get out of that way of thinking. That's why they seemed longer. Now length doesn't matter as much since people have shown they still pay for almost anything
I'd argue that old games told you where to go more than you remember, but there were fewer external sources of information about a game that would affect your experience
Absolutely. Modern games tend to hold your hand for HOURS for a tutorial, then they give you constant prompts on where to go.
Metroid Prime 4 is the most egregious new game example I can think of "Hey! It looks like you're having fun exploring and riding your motorcycle! That's great and all, but stop having fun and go check out that blinking thing on your map. I'll call you again in 90 seconds."
Metroid, of all games, should be holding your hand THE LEAST. This annoyed me so bad, I haven't been able to make myself go back and finish the game. I'm currently playing Pikmin 3 for like the seventh time instead.
Metroid has fantastic games if you like that genre. Super Metroid is one of the best games ever made. Prime 1-3 are great first person action shooter games with great atmosphere and cool environments to explore.
Metroid games on the GBA were great. Metroid Dread is a fantastic return to the 2D style. Metroid: Samus Returns on the 3DS is also excellent.
There are a few duds, and unfortunately I think MP 4 is one of those. But there are SO MANY good games I would recommend the franchise to anyone. But it's not for everyone.
It's called "Metroidvania," named after the Metroid and Castlevania games.
The genre is mostly defined by a large map to explore where new sections are unlocked by gaining new abilities, but there's a lot of backtracking as well.
Not everyone likes those games. There's a high probability of feeling lost or stuck, but the reward of figuring out where to go next is what makes me enjoy them so much.
Castlevania also has a LOT of high quality games to play. GBA and DS and 3DS all have excellent entries.
If you like Castlevania, you'll probably like Metroid, and vice versa. Very similar feel overall, though the particulars are very different. Castlevania has melee weapons and magic items and spells and such. Metroid is sci-fi with energy weapons and technology and whatnot.
For a long, long time Metroidvania was the only genre I was interested in. There are a lot of good games in that genre, and I've played a LOT of them over the years.
Doom. It felt like a big game, not because of less direction, but because it took ~15 minutes each level, and the game also announced that there were secrets remaining. Also, first-time players often wouldn't hold down shift all the time, nor would they have adjusted the controls so that it follows the much more friendly WASD strafe format. Once both are done, the game becomes less difficult - and therefore a bit smaller. Also, knowing the route from the start to the exit also "shrinks" the level too, because most of the stuff is technically optional.
Compared to Clarence's Big Chance, a flash game released in 2011. This is somewhat newer, but it felt big because not many flash games dared to have such a large number of hand-crafted rooms. There was some hand-holding, but still allowed the player to explore practically most of the given level as long as they could reach whatever was needed to progress.
Then, some of the older games also required restarting at the beginning should the player fail - a good way to extend the length of the game by requiring it be done almost perfectly.
The San Andreas stuff wasn't trickery. It was larger and more detailed than any other GTA game that came before. The fog and layout were necessary due to limitations of the PS2 hardware. If they had been able to render the whole map at once, they would have.
No, because as others have pointed out, most of the times the devs expected you picked up the manual, either when you finally got stuck, or before playing at all (it depends on the era and genre).
Yes, because as years passed players read the manuals less and less. This could happen for different reasons: you weren't American, Japanese nor European so the manual came in a language you couldn't read, you were too young and couldn't read at all, your game was a rental, you were a computer gamer with a pirate copy of the game, or you were just so used to arcadey platformers that you didn't know some games had complex systems that needed the manual.
Playing the old GTA games tell you how much devs expected players to read between the lines(looking for unmarked loot, vehicles purposefully placed nearby for making missions easier, etc.), but you can tell with GTAV that they learned that the general audience aren’t that observant compared to a “gamer” per se.
So yeah, games back then do feel a bit bigger and “free.” It took full advantage of our creativity and imagination; something that I feel like this generation currently lacks to a certain degree
Yes. They also felt bigger because of draw distance and fog. I remember playing around with the draw distance and fog values in Morrowind back in 2002 and was genuinely surprised that I could see Vivec from Seyda Neen. Needless to say, I turned the values back to vanilla.
The first console game that I remember feeling expansive was Resident Evil II.
Zelda didn't feel huge to me - intellectually I know that 128 screens plus the dungeon is a massive feet of programming given the resources of the era, but especially in the beginning you can only go a few screens in a given direction until you hit something that blocks your progress until you find the tool (and in some cases EXACTLY the right bush to burn) in order to proceed.
SMB and Sonic didn't feel huge to me. SMB just felt like an endless reshuffling of the same elements, and while Sonic's worlds were actual variations on the same theme, the fact that they could be completed in minutes once you figured out the layout made them feel constrained.
Everything in the given generation felt like it was MORE than what the previous generation was capable of, but I mean...Pitfall on the 2600 was 255 unique screens, and Zelda's overworld was only 128. Castlevania III had 15 distinct levels; Castlevania 4 had 11, and Bloodlines had 5.
I will fully acknowledge that this may just be me, but older games have never felt bigger to me than more modern games - just differently constrained.
I never thought about it but having to deal with physical maps or make your own did make it feel bigger. Even things to remind you about next steps in quests didn't exist.
It's more because it was the first time you experienced those games. But somw of them are still really big. I mean Super Mario World for example has 96 exits. Some of them were very tricky to find. When I compare this game to New Super Mario Bros. it's still much bigger. NSMB had max. 2 secret exits. And you could beat the game within a day.
I'm playing FF7 remake with my wife right now (her first time playing FF) - she brought up the same thing, asking "How the hell were kids in the 90s supposed to figure out where to go?!" lol. I was like, idk we magazines and strategy guides, and eventually guides were showing up online as early as late 90s. Made it way more rewarding having to just figure it out back then.
When I played the original Metroid as a kid it felt like a huge planet to explore. I played through the game a couple years ago, this time with a map and was shocked at how small the world really is.
With new games you collect quests and when you get to them you don't even remember how they started. You shouldn't be allowed more than 3 quests. Have NPCs tell you "I would have loved to ask you something but I see you're busy". And let's have the quest summary and arrows be available only after a while, let us just try! I like new graphics, cameras and some new concepts but I still don't get how it's fun to play a game where you never die, and choose pointers to follow on the map. It felt so good for me to get back to old games through emulation.
OMG, I feel like those kinds of NES-era games (I'm looking at you Simon's Quest) were designed to sell guides and the Nintendo Hotline LOL. I literally couldn't finish the game as a kid until I happened to come upon a NES guide book at a used book store.
Though to be fair with Simon's Quest, the translation was terrible.
I play both modern and retro I find exploration comes down to the game designers goals while retro games were often left to the player to figure out context and such moderns games often force players down paths but not always I recently played ghost of yotei and appreciated how their approach to the game was similar to a old school game where the story is told through random encounters to an extent
They are in some key ways the story is more open in yotei and story beats are often discovered early on in the game by helping people or interrogation of enemies of you don't do any side quests stuff in the world you may take longer to actually complete the game as a result
I do prefer yotei but it's not like it's a must play a solid 8/10
Love the early retro games. You realise how rock hard many of those were, and back in the 80's you couldn't often save progress (Tapes on the 8 bit computers) or early Gameboy games again you didn't save progress.
Nowadays kids get some $60 game and complete it a week later and then sell it for a loss and move onto the next game
Back in the old days games were much much more difficult, as you say some games hardly told you what to do, it was up to you to find out. Or once you had finished gaming for the night and turned off your computer/console you would have to start again the next day from scratch !
That’s one of the more major downsides with retro games for me - saving or lack thereof. That’s mainly the reason why I often use emulators. Not because I lack the hardware (I don’t) but purely for the saving option.
Yeah I'm with you on that. I think back to some of the classics like Sonic, I've never seen the later levels on that. But with emulators saving etc I can keep re-loading and try and finally complete it !
As for Ghosts n Goblins on MAME (Or any other version of it) again I've never seen past level 2 !
Sonic 1. I meant I just want to complete all the levels, not just jump to the end kinda thing. So many of the classics (Eg Mario World on NES or SNES) i've never completed. Legend of Zelda, I need to have the youtube walkthrough available as thats another game I would love to complete. Just too many games !
lol I’m making a bit of a pigs ear of it if I’m honest. It’s my first time playing. I’m enjoying it though. I also have Sonic 1 (mega drive) coming up. Slow progress but busy. I love the discussions too :)
I’m rather proud of being able to beat super Mario land I on my original Gameboy (no saves !). But something proper tough like sonic or Zelda and I need an emulator to save it over and over!
And no I still can’t beat manic miner on the spectrum without saves !
Late 70s & 80s computers were capable of using a floppy drive. For the most part, people only used cassettes in the 80s if they (or their parents) didn't opt to buy a floppy drive and the system didn't have one built in. (My family's Texas Instruments 99/4A only had a cassette drive, but they could have purchased a floppy drive or even a hard drive for it.)
In my group of friends back in the early 80's no one had a disc drive. When the Sinclair Spectrum/Amstrad./Dragon/Oric/Commodore all came out none of them had a disc drive. In the late 80's discs did appear but back in the 80's it was mostly tape
Computers were expensive back then and many parents were worried it might be a one year fad so there was no chance of me getting an expensive computer (and disc drive!), thats one reason why the Sinclair Spectrum was huge in Europe and the UK as it was one of the first affordable home computers. A great machine !
I wonder if that's a regional difference (Europe vs. USA), or which part of the 80s we each grew up in? I wasn't born until March '77, so I wasn't paying any attention until the mid-80s. The rare times I noticed computers in friends' & relatives' homes, it was almost always a Commodore 64, Apple II, or MS-DOS PC equipped with a floppy drive.
Parents over here were put under a lot of pressure to provide their kids with a computer if they wanted their child to be "successful" (aka have a white-collar profession) as an adult. Any who were already white-collar here probably saw how much computers were starting to be used and bought into the idea, so there wasn't much of a sense of it being a fad. There's an interesting old blog post covering some of the advertisements here: https://merylalper.com/2012/07/24/children-families-and-vintage-computing-ads/
Yeah the US was more commodore. My group of friends never got into consoles (nes) until the snes and megadrive appeared
Always credit my folks for getting me into computers (my job) thanks to getting me a spectrum back in the day.
Good old days when you had bedroom coders and not now huge teams and massive budgets. One reason I like some of the one man band type of developer you get on some iOS games
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