NES era developers knew that many of their customers could only afford a few games a year but also didn't have enough memory on the carts for extremely large games. The only way to prevent kids from blowing through the content in a weekend was to crank the difficulty up or figure out some way to offer endless replayability (ala Tetris).

It's really incredible when you see printed out maps of old NES games just how small the levels were. You could put an entire game in a 4 or 5 page spread in Nintendo Power if you wanted.

It was at least in some cases explicitly about rentals. That's why the difficulty was jacked up for US releases -- Nintendo was successful at getting game rentals legally banned in Japan, but not the US.

Weird that the internet opinion is that the Japanese release is the harder one because Americans don't have the patience for super hard games. Examples include Final Fantasy (that simplified the item system) or the "Lost Levels" of Super Mario Brothers.

Many games, not just the original SMB2.

Rock Man 2 (Mega Man 2 in North America) had one only difficulty in the Japanese release. In North America, Mega Man 2 offered a "Difficult" option, which was the original Japanese difficulty. "Normal" was the default difficulty for the North America release toned things down quite a bit, as Capcom felt the game would be considered too difficult by the North American market.

There's well documented lists of games that were significantly easier for the North American release, with only a few harder for North America.

In fact, the difficulty tuning was usually harder within the first release of the game(regardless of location). So games that saw a US release first were hard there, while games released in Japan first were hard in that version. And since the majority of the NES library derives from Japan-first releases you get the "Japan version is harder" effect.

There are some exceptions to the rule of course, but it usually holds that the later localizations get the more polished product.

Games adjusted to be harder for the US can have really punishing levels of difficulty though. Like the US Hard Corps release is excessively hard.

A counterexample: Resident Evil was actually harder in the US because they removed the auto aim feature, specifically so US game renters would have a hard time beating it. I'm sure there are more examples of both kinds of modifications for the US market.

You're not in any danger of finishing Final Fantasy in a few hours. The Lost Levels is not really a very good game.

If that's what Nintendo were trying to do they did a piss-poor job at it. I beat Super Mario World over a single weekend's rental.

Ahhh, those were the days. You knew you had 72 hours from the moment you left the store and goddamnit you would spend that time effectively :-)

It didn't happen to every game, but compare, for instance, the US and Japan releases for Contra 3 or Contra: Hard Corps.

Nintendo hard described the NES era, not the SNES.

It happened with sixteen-bit games too.

PS1 was the golden era IMO. It was slow enough for good graphics, so gameplay came first. But it was fast enough for rather good physics and AI.

I find it hard to go back and play early 3D games. But on the "exploitation" front there is no pay-to-win stuff.

Yeah, Wipe Out!

Isn't the golden age now, where difficulty is customizable?

Absolutely not. Difficulty is customisable, but we still live in a world where massive AAA titles lock things which in previous generations were relatively easily attainable behind grinding measured in weeks, not days, with no regard for any difficulty setting you might have, while constantly suggesting both explicitly and by implication that you could skip the grind by just giving them more money.

I think a lot of the indie and AA space is still very good, though.

The reason the golden age is now is specifically because you have all those options. Just because AAA games exist doesn't invalidate the fact that if you are looking for a specific type of more traditional game experience, you can find it much easier then ever before.

The "Golden Age" usually refers to when the great works were produced; otherwise we'd always simultaneously be in every golden age that ever occurred (barring the works in question being destroyed), making the term kind of meaningless.

Well, no, because the axis we're looking at isn't difficulty. And customizable difficult is not a recent idea.

Difficulty levels have been a thing for over 20 years.