Looking back at playing computer games in the 80s, there is a huge amount of nostalgia, but also a feeling that most games were hard. Really hard. It certainly felt they were harder that a lot of games that were made since then.
Games like Paper Boy, Manic Miner, Impossible Mission, Spy Hunter….
Was this just because I was younger and found games harder. Probably not, I think over time I got better at games, though I’m sure I’m past my gaming heyday. I certainly don’t play games as much as I used to. Early games really did feel considerably harder than modern games.
Were games that hard? Did games get easier?
We start of with a platformer game so you can try playing through the ages and see if is really was more difficult.
Unforgiving
Early computer games were often very unforgiving. Even from the very start, they gave you very little assistance on what to do in the game. They gave you a level set-up with no indication of what you had to do. As it was the early days, a lot of the rules of computer games weren’t already laid out for you, so you didn’t necessarily know what you could and couldn’t do. A lot of experimentation had to take place.
But even when you knew what to do in the game, there were a lot of things working against you. You had a very limited number of lives, often just two or three, and no chance of getting new ones at all. There were very few continues, so if you lost all your lives, it was straight back to the beginning of the game for you — maybe not just back to a checkpoint or the beginning of a level.
Because a lot of games, certainly in the UK, were cassette based, you couldn’t save your games partway through. You had to keep going, playing and playing, until you lost all your lives or, more likely, you were called for dinner and had to switch the machine off.
There were also lots of areas where instant-death hazards were very common. It’s not like modern games where if you touch a baddie, a spike, or something like that, you get another life or another chance to carry on. Like in Mario, if you are Super Mario, you might hit a baddie and move down to normal Mario. But in the old days, that was game over, or at least the loss of a life.
Precise jumps were the norm as well. You had to be pixel-perfect, and collision detection with baddies was unforgiving too. Modern computer games have a concept sometimes known as “coyote time.” If you try to make a jump fractionally too late and the character has technically left the platform, the game gives you a little extra help and still allows you to make that jump.
Modern games have a certain felling of physics, mixed with the ability to change your jump mid air. This made games feel on the one hand more realistic and intuitive, but also more forgiving as you can change your path to land correctly or avoid danger mid air.
Modern games also have input buffering. If you try to jump before making a landing, the game recognises this and then performs the jump for you. Back in the 1980s, you had to make sure your character had actually landed before you could jump, which made things a lot more difficult.
It was rare to have difficulty setting that you could change. A lot of the time it felt the difficulty setting was permanently stuck on hard.
Another reason games could be seen as very hard back in the day was that a lot of games, especially in the UK, were made by just one person. These days, computer games are made by a small team, or teams of hundreds or possibly thousands. In modern game development, you have designers, programmers, artists, testers, producers… With specialist roles these teams can create a more inclusive games for users of varying ability.
Because there was only one person working on the game, this could lead to what is sometimes called developer blindness. When a developer had played the level thousands of times, they knew exactly what to do, and difficult sections became trivial to them. Sometimes, what feels obvious to a developer can be baffling to players.
Possibly friends and family might provide some testing, but testers ultimately become very familiar with the game too. The difficulty could gradually escalate without anybody really noticing.
I know from my own experience as a software developer that this is something I have to be wary of. If I’m creating a new screen or a new piece of functionality for a product, I have to step back and think: how will the user see this? What is actually difficult for them? Otherwise I must just instinctively work my way through pages that I have already walked through hundreds of times.
Hardware limitations
Early computers were often sold as educational or business devices, with gaming as a secondary thought. This meant that the input devices used to play games were not very consistent, and there was no real standard.
These days, keyboard controls tend to be fairly standardised, such as the use of WASD. But in the 1980s, games used all sorts of keyboard combinations that you had to relearn for each game. Sometimes you used X, A, U and P; sometimes Z and X; sometimes the cursor keys; sometimes number keys;.
The keyboards themselves were not great either. Sometimes they could not process or detect certain combinations of keys being pressed together. Some home computers, such as the ZX Spectrum, had a very poor keyboard, making precise playing very difficult with their rubber keys.
Most home users would have had a joystick, but these had their own problems as well. They tended to be digital rather than analogue, which made it harder to control things precisely. They usually had up, down, left, right, and only one fire button. That limited the different actions you could perform, unlike modern game controllers, which have a whole range of ergonomically designed buttons in the right places for playing.
Many games mapped pushing up to the jump action. That made running along and then wanting to jump upwards, or diagonally up and to the right, really difficult to do. Jumping and controlling your character also had to be done with one hand, unlike modern controllers where you can use one hand for jumping and the other to control the character’s direction.
There was a huge variation in joystick quality. Some were stiff to move, and many had a long travel distance, so you had to push the joystick quite a way before your character would respond. Many were poorly designed for moving up and to the left, or up and to the right. Over time, joysticks would get worn-out contacts.
For example, I remember playing a game called Daley Thompson’s Decathlon, which involved constantly waggling the joystick from left to right. This had a repuation as a joystick killer.
I don’t remember seeing a mouse until the late 80’s, and certainly didn’t have my own mouse to play games until my first PC in the 90s. Think of all the games that work so well with a mouse or analogue controller, and then try to think how this would work with a clunky joystick.
Arcade DNA
In the 80s computer games grew up in the arcade. This is where different games had their genesis. Computer games in the home, tried to emulate a lot of the existing arcade machines, and arcade games and how they played.
So typical an arcade machine would take coin, entertain the player for a while, kill the player off, before encouraging the gamer to feed the machine another ten-pence.
Games couldn’t allow an average player to occupy the cabinet indefinitely. They were difficult for commercial reasons, to make money. And players expected games to require repeated attempts to progress through them… even it involved in gobbling up all their ten-pence pieces. So when games start to come into the home, they instinctively used the same DNA.
Yes, you didn’t need to put a ten-pence coin inside your machine, but the same sort of design philosophy remained. Lives remained limited. That game over message remained, that still carries the same impact. And high scores remained important. Those games really push you to see how long you can survive, and whether you can reach the end of the story.
Due to limitations of the tiny amounts of storage these home games had, and particularly when distributed on a cassette tape in the UK, the games were small. Developers didn’t have the resources to create enormous worlds for you to play in.
If imagine we had a game that contained only twenty scenes, and each of these scenes only took a minute to play through. If it wasn’t difficult, the game that you’d just spent all your pocket money on would be over in twenty minutes. So developers had tricks up the sleeves that could make the game harder to master. So your, game could last longer, and your pocket money wasn’t wasted.
Later on we used to be able to rent computer games from the local Blockbuster store. This was the time of cartridge-based games, where the games were a lot bigger. So when you hired a cartridge for your SNES or your Megadrive and brought it home, the developers of game didn’t want you to complete it too quickly. Developers found that if you could rent a computer game and complete it in a weekend, why would you want to rent that game again or actually go out and buy the game if he liked it?
British Game Culture
British game culture was very different from that of the rest of the world. One reason was that cassette was king. Nobody could really afford an expensive disc drive, so people with early computers such as the Commodore 64 and Spectrum used cassettes. I don’t remember any of my friends having anything else.
Games could be distributed on ordinary cassette tapes very cheaply, and they were sold relatively cheaply too. I remember buying many games for just two or three pounds. I would go out every couple of weeks and buy a new game because they were so affordable.
This meant that smaller developers could publish games which led to more experimentation. There was less financial risk, and strange ideas had a chance of reaching the market. But there was a downside too: game quality varied enormously. Games could be brilliant, terrible, or sometimes almost impossible to play — and occasionally all three at once.
British games tended to be weird as well. I think that was part of British eccentricity and culture. Games such as Manic Miner, Jet Set Willy, Chucky Egg, and School Daze were based on recognisably British settings. Instead of fantasy kingdoms, stories set in space, or heroic warriors, we had games based on British coal miners, schoolchildren, moles, and country houses. Even toilets featured in some games.
A lot of games also featured British humour: Monty Python-esque surrealism, working-class and everyday references, puns, satire, and sometimes outright absurdity. I think this came from the combination of small teams and individual creators. There was less corporate oversight and, because publishing was cheap, lower financial stakes. All sorts of games could be published and generally were.
Meanwhile, things were happening differently in Japan. Dedicated game consoles gave Nintendo and others an important advantage: they knew exactly which controller the player owned, so they could standardise controls. On the NES, you had the D-pad, A and B buttons, and Start and Select buttons. This separated movement and action: the left hand controlled movement, while the right hand handled jumping or other actions. Compared with one-button joysticks, this made gaming much easier on those Japanese consoles.
Nintendo also did something brilliantly when it released Super Mario Bros. Its first level taught the player how to play through fantastic level design, rather than through a strict tutorial. As you played, you encountered your first Goomba, learned to jump, hit blocks, and discovered things as you went. No tutorial was needed: you learned simply by playing.
This approach continued throughout the game. There was a difficulty curve, but each new concept was introduced gradually, allowing players to practise new abilities before facing a new challenge.
Home computer games were different. It was often a case of: “Here’s your first screen. Good luck. Get on with it.”
This was not necessarily because Japanese developers were inherently better designers. They were developing within a different culture. They knew the hardware and control environment, had a different development culture, and operated in a different commercial environment as well.
Below is a short platform game that lets you vary the difficult of the controls, to try an simulate how you might play the game through different eras:
