And even then, easy was in the eye of the beholder. As a kid, i lost a lot of quarters wondering wth was going on in game and Atari had more bad games than good games. To think i paid $60 USD for Pole Position back in the day. I'd take Forza anyday over that old road wiggle experience.
> Nolan Bushnell: A little bit. Remember that Atari was founded as a coin-op company. And coin-op has this requirement that a newbie has to get into the game almost instantly without reading instructions. So the simplicity of onboarding is lost by a lot of people right now.
Which makes sense to me, of COURSE you have to be able to "just start playing" if you wanted to get someone to put a quarter into a machine they hadn't played before!
Some of the RTS/simulation stuff I play these days have an hour or two of tutorials to explain all the complicated underpinnings of things occurring.
Defender is a play on sight title because of that idea. Love that game and it is hard! But if you put out, really try, you are richly rewarded. When one gets I to the zone, or flow on that game, the world goes away, and it is amazing. Addictive.
I am building a cabinet for that one. Got my perfect low hour CRT and need to cut some wood, and yeah! Can't wait.
On one axis the perfect coin-op is trivially easy to get into but almost impossibly hard to master.
On a related axis you trade off progress/satisfaction vs frustration. In a perfect game frustration at failure motivates the desire to make progress. The game produces just enough satisfaction - likely with intermittent reward - to keep players coming back.
Too much frustration and players give up. Too little and they master the game and their quarter lasts for half an hour.
The original PacMan is pretty close to ideal. It's immediately obvious what the goal is, and then you slowly understand how the game is designed and start to master each level.
Battlezone was a failure, because once you worked out (or were shown) the one trick - dealing with the saucer and missiles by staying in reverse - the game became too easy.
The pain point in both classic games and fromsoft games for me is the amount of time it takes to try something again. The feedback loop is often so long that I get annoyed with how long it takes to even ATTEMPT the part that tripped me up again.
Say I'm struggling with a particular screen in megaman, and say that screen is maybe the 10th screen in a level. I get to that screen, I die, I start back on screen 1. I now have to go through all 10 screens again just to try the part I'm stuck on. And then after a few tries I progress to screen 11 and I die. I'm back on screen one again and the cycle continues.
Yes, this results in me getting really good at every part before then, and it can look visually impressive once I know the whole map because I have the whole thing memorized at some point, but that takes a lot of time and I just don't play games like I used to. I have the same issues with fromsoft games, but it's actually better for me with classic games, because they usually have the kindness to put a checkpoint right before the level boss. But dark souls rarely puts a bonfire within spitting distance of a boss.
I didn't mind when I was younger, which is why I can 1cc Castlevania and Sonic 3, but it's just not something I'm willing to put the time into these days. And that's fine, I don't think they should make the games easier or anything, it just means I'm probably not going to play them.
Edit: This is also why I don't really play competitive multiplayer games anymore. I may have the time to put in to get good enough to have fun, but I'm not willing to commit it to getting good.
1. Give you a deep sense of gratification when you succeed.
2. Keep the stakes low and make the game feel safe to play.
Humans experience things in terms of contrasts, so the easiest way to ramp up the gratification on winning is to punish the player if they lose.
But what punishments are available to a game? You could imagine a game that demanded access to your bank account and withdrew cash every time you lost. Or maybe it deleted a random file off your hard disk. Playing would definitely work up a sweat and give you a profound sense of relief if you won. But it would completely undermine the sense of safety needed to make a game feel like a game and not a job or task.
Because of (2), most games can't really take much from you. The main punishments they are able to mete out are:
1. Waste your time. Give you timers or cut scenes that have to be replayed before you can jump back in.
2. Bore you by making you replay stuff you've already played.
3. Destroy virtual items. If the game randomly generates treasure, then losing it on player death can be particularly anguishing because you don't know when you'll get it back.
But, really, that all boils down to wasting your time. Because you can always get back that lost item if you grind long enough.
That means that the cost model for playing the game varies widely based on player free time. Like you, I simply no longer have a lot of free time that I'm willing to pour into games. So, while I still like them, they're effectively too expensive for me to afford.
Now I can manage the game in an afternoon without it.
Similar in that one could just start doing stuff. Then, just when it gets a bit boring, looking at the controls, and beginning to strategize brought one almost a new game!
I played that and Missile Command a lot.