this post was submitted on 20 Jan 2026
640 points (97.6% liked)
Funny
13112 readers
852 users here now
General rules:
- Be kind.
- All posts must make an attempt to be funny.
- Obey the general sh.itjust.works instance rules.
- No politics or political figures. There are plenty of other politics communities to choose from.
- Don't post anything grotesque or potentially illegal. Examples include pornography, gore, animal cruelty, inappropriate jokes involving kids, etc.
Exceptions may be made at the discretion of the mods.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Wait, what? The video game rentals had a set level of difficulty that couldn't be changed in the menu or something?
No, the difficulty of games of that era was just a function of necessity.
Not only did you have hardware limitations, games were deliberately designed to take longer that a typical rental period to beat, the goal being to get kids to either rent it again or have their parents buy it.
So while an arcade game is designed to eat quarters, the console games of the 80's and 90's were designed not to be fun so much as they were designed to be too difficult to beat in a weekend.
That's one thing when it's a game like Donkey Kong Country, it's another thing when a platformer is designed to cause a bunch of deaths and game overs with required leaps of faith or whatever.
No. Almost all of them were normal, unmodified retail copies.