Topic: Why is it that classic games are more challenging than modern games?

I have always wanted to know why. It seems that classic games are more harder than modern games. Don't get me wrong, there are some modern games that are still tough and challenging, but not as much as the classic games.

Because most games today are generated towards kids, and since the kids of 2010 have a MUCH shorter attention span than the kids of 1985, the games today are easier and shorter.

While I can't say with 100% certianty, I can hazard a guess...
I would say that society as a whole has become a lot more impatient/lazy...Thus, many do not have the desire to exert to much effort into beating a game. I would assume that developers noticed this, and thus began throwing out ideas, such as lives systems and whatnot...So, gamers are left with simpler, easier games that appeal to them better. All in all, it's probably just a change in tastes as time moves on.
_{Plus, the lack of save features in old games really made things frustrating...}

Because they're trying to appeal to a wider audience, and also because of the move from arcades to home consoles. That's how I see it, at least.

Yeah, and most games I see today are casual games.

Well, most older games pack half an hour of gameplay start to end. They needed to be tough. Especially the ones that got their start in arcades.

I believe the reason was cuz due to space limitations with cartridges at the time, most games back then were only an hour or so long (or shorter). So they compensated for that by making the games frustratingly difficult, thus artificially lengthening them.

Wow - some weird comments in here. Shorter attention spans (despite games actually getting exponentially longer - Final Fantasy games now lasting 120 hours rather than 20, for instance), people getting lazy (despite working hours actually getting longer)? I mean really?

This thread is pretty much a nostalgic ego stroke, but for the sake of it:

Games have evolved. Often as not they're now designed to appeal to a broad audience (ie people that don't want to waste months to become world champion Pac Man players, but want to play the occasional videogame on a rainy weekend), or give the player an experience, rather than a challenge.

Easier? Mabye, sure. More entertaining and intelligent on a greater number of levels? Absolutely. Games have evolved into an interactive art form in their own right.

Maybe you just stink at old games?

_{Just kidding!}

To make them more accessable. The old games required determination and skill, something a lot of kids tend to lack. While I can appreciate the difficulty of older games now that I'm more mature, it wasn't until games got easier that I was able to play games for more than a few minutes without giving up in frustration.

Oh, and not to mention a lot of games are geared towards adults, who generally don't have hours to waste on single jump. Those games have to be shorter and less challenging in order to meet the needs of their target audience.

Yeah, it's true. Even now, as much as I like the occasional "throwback to old style" game (such as The Dark Spire), I can't play them for long at a time. The games I can play for 7 or 8 hours a time are the "easy" ones like Final Fantasy.

"Nostalgic ego stroke" - :/ ???
Never heard that one before. Although, I never found nostalgia to be a bad thing.

It's a terrible thing when it inhibits your ability to enjoy the present.

I enjoy the present, and sometimes I feel nostalgic of the past. However, that doesn't stop me from enjoying the present.

Warning: this may come off as a "why video games are worse now than before" argument, but I don't honestly care.

It's all about consumers getting dumber and companies getting smarter. But before we go there, let's look at the early days. When video game companies weren't soulless devils, they knew they had to give what we video game players want, which was a good-to-control, unique, and challenging game. There was no real "formula" yet for guaranteeing that a game would sell thousands, so game companies had to experiment with the last two variables mentioned above. Some companies tried to sell their game solely on uniqueness while others attempted to ramp up the difficulty to make their game stand out. However, the games that expressed uniqueness and difficulty were the ones that stood out. But two things changed this; the casual market and the internet (trust me, this last will make sense). The casual market changed the market as a whole into a less smart crowd, which companies saw as an opportunity to exploit the market to earn mass profit. However, the soulless devils that were now the video game companies didn't know what the mass market really wanted, which meant they really couldn't survive long. There was the FPS which was slightly addictive (fast-paced action, blowing stuff up), but they really didn't have enough of a hook to make massive amounts of money. Then there came the internet. Now having the power to mix the FPS and real life competition that wasn't in the same room, someone was going to profit. Unfortunately, that was Microsoft/Bungie with Halo......^sigh...

It's all about consumers getting dumber and companies getting smarter.

You were wrong from this statement, and it just got worse from there.

How am I wrong? The casual market is dumber than the serious market in regards to what's actually made with appreciation of the medium and companies are just exploiting things in order to sell games, which technically is making them do less work to get more money, thereby making them smart. Or at least the American developers are exploiting things. The Japanese are sorta riding on the fact that they're sticking to their old franchises and making games that are over-the-top crazy with not much in the actual way of gameplay.

P.S. Did I also mention that the casual market makes up for more than %60 of all video game players?

I don't think the consumers are dumb.

Wow, you people saying people are dumber/lazier need to stop smelling your own farts (South Park reference, to anyone who caught it) and speak for yourself. YOU are a gamer of today, which means you're admitting you've gotten stupider as time has passed, I guess. That aside, it's not true at all. Games from back then had to be relentlessly difficult because they were too small to keep anyone's attention for very long. The difficulty gave it a lot of replay value. I also think that, if you have gotten used to today's games, it's even harder to go back and try to play those, because games aren't made like that anymore. It's been said before, but I think it's funny that people think we don't have the attention spans we did back in the day (oh, these kids today and their new-fandangled contraptions!) Especially considering how much bigger games are today. Most games today are ten hours long at the very least, and if not, people usually complain that there's not enough to it. "Retro" games are around 30 minutes long, most of the time, and maybe the longer RPGs get up to about 20 hours.

"they knew they had to give what we video game players want"

And that hasn't changed. The only thing that's changed are the gamers. YOU are no longer where the money is at, so not as many companies are gonna make games that appeal to you. There are still games with all that criteria you mentioned, you just have to look harder to find it.

Oh, and the FPS craze didn't even start with Halo. It started with Doom. The only thing Halo did was bring the craze to the console market.