I think this is just nostalgia talking.

My first SNES games, Super Mario World, is a 5 hours long game, 9 if you are going to 100% it https://howlongtobeat.com/game/9387

And I did beat it back then. Not a super complicated game.

What I didn’t remember though and only looked up recently: the MSRP was $60-70 https://imgur.io/khmhfoA

Today that would be like $120-130 for a 5 hours long game https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/ But honestly nowadays even $60-70 for a 5 hours long game would be atrocious no matter the nostalgia factor.

Made me think why my parents only bought a game for me three times a year (birthday, christmas, summer vacation)

> My first SNES games, Super Mario World, is a 5 hours long game, 9 if you are going to 100% it https://howlongtobeat.com/game/9387

That is is you have already mastered games. It takes years to get good enough to beat those games in the time those sites says, if you have already spent years playing games then yes you play through those games quickly.

For example, that site lists Super Mario Bros as a 2 hour game. Do you think me as a kid beat that game in 2 hours? No, of course not, I spent hundreds of hours playing it in total and never beat it. At that time games were made arcade hard, they weren't meant for kids to beat, they were meant to provide a long lasting challenge so you can try over and over.

https://howlongtobeat.com/game/9371

> For example, that site lists Super Mario Bros as a 2 hour game. Do you think me as a kid beat that game in 2 hours? No, of course not, I spent hundreds of hours playing it in total and never beat it.

We had so much time, though so it wasn't a big deal how hard and tedious a game was. As a bored teenager, dropping 100 hours on a video game in 2-3 weeks was nothing. There was nothing else to do. Trying and failing at a game over and over felt entertaining.

I'm closing in on my 50s, and gaming is just different now. I recently grabbed a NES emulator and a knock-off USB NES gamepad and played through a bunch of old games from my childhood. It hits real different now that I have a life and time is precious.

Games that I remember as fun are now just time consuming and frustrating, rather than entertaining. Platformers where you needed surgical precision to land on just the right brick or you're back to the beginning of the level: irritating and very quickly my brain starts telling me: "This is not worth it." RPGs where you spend most of your time grinding between bosses who (randomly) either kill your party or go down without much of a fight, my brain says: "This is definitely not as entertaining as I remember it." And all the while, I'm watching the clock, thinking about how otherwise productive I could be being right now...

Sure. Closing in on my 50s too. I generally don't have patience for most games of that era either. I think quite a few of those games still stand up but when I play them now it's more of a historical engineering thing where I am understanding and figuring out how they pulled off certain effects, etc.

    I recently grabbed a NES emulator and a knock-off USB NES 
    gamepad and played through a bunch of old games from my 
    childhood. It hits real different now that I have a life 
    and time is precious.

Getting back to the point of the linked article, there were some special things about how these games looked and played on real hardware on real CRTs. One was the look. Two was a true zero-latency experience. While we may have "nostalgia" about the CRT look, there are also objective differences there.

    And all the while, I'm watching the clock, thinking about how 
    otherwise productive I could be being right now... 

I feel this too. But I also feel this way about reading books at this point in my life, I'm ashamed to say. I hardly read any more. But I don't blame the games, or the books. It's clearly me that has changed.

> https://howlongtobeat.com/

The completion times seem generally lower than I expected. I wonder if there is a selection bias, as in most users who submitted stats are people are pretty good at games. Or maybe for classic games, it's recording replay times from people who have already beat it years ago, as opposed to first runs through the game.

(It's the first time I have heard of this site, so I looked up stats for the most recent game I completed, and it said I was 4 times slower than the median and only 3 minutes faster than the slowest time ever. This is true for most games I sampled so I am just bad at games.)

In modern AA/AAA titles there often is way too much filler content for my taste; clearly not respecting my time.

Also tutorials (Pikmin 4 recently put me off again because of that) and way too much in-your-face world building in general… the original Doom had lots of world building but also impeccably thought through gameplay and one manual page that set the scene very simply end effectively. Everything else emerged throughout actual immediacy of game play and the world itself.

Unfortunately not every game can be a Disco Elysium a Cyberpunk 2077 or a Baldur’s Gate 3. No need to waste my time; just be honest about it rather than inflate playtime.

So some of those other games … they could have been good maybe even great 5 hour experiences instead even at “full price”.

Super Mario World was not a 5 to 9 hour long game for a 10 year old in the 90s.

You can play as different characters, find hidden worlds, play around. Super Mario World was a game you could play over and over. I might go back to it today.

Duck hunt was the same thing over and over but you kept playing

There were many games you could pass quickly. You rented those games. You had Romance of the three Kingdom which would take years to pass

    What I didn’t remember though and only looked up
    recently: the MSRP was $60-70

Notice that Super Mario World isn't even in that ad. That's because Super Mario World was a free pack-in game for most of the SNES's lifespan, at least in the US. So the MSRP was effectively $0 for a lot of us.

    is a 5 hours long game, 

That means you spent about 10-15 minutes on each level if you did a minimal playthrough and skipped all secrets. A brisk clip for an initial playthrough but it seems reasonable for an experienced gamer I guess.

There's no right or wrong way to enjoy a game, so if you are the type to power through a minimal playthrough and never touch it again... cool. No hate. That's your style. I have definitely done that with some games.

On the other hand if I enjoyed a game back then I definitely replayed it multiple times, so "5 hours to completion" definitely did not equal "5 hours of fun" for me and a lot of other people.

    9 [hours] if you are going to 100%

Now this number is objectively junk.

Some of the hidden worlds and hidden exits are tough to find and are going to require experimentation, death, and some blind jumps IIRC. To get all 96 exits you're going to have to beat all 73 levels and you're going to have to beat some of them twice so you will play a total of 96 levels.

So 100%'ing this game in 9 hours means you are hitting a new exit every 5.6 minutes. That doesn't seem realistic for most people on their first playthrough.

Obviously you can do it in less than 9 hours if you know where everything is by using playthroughs, walkthroughs, savestates, etc. The world record is 1h21m.

A child doesn't pick up Mario World and just beat it in 5 hours on the first go through. Those playthrough times listed are for people who already are expert at the game and already know all the levels.

My family spent more than a year playing Mario World, exploring, finding secrets.

> I think this is just nostalgia talking. My first SNES games, Super Mario World, is a 5 hours long game

Nice humblebrag. I put a hundred+ hours into Super Mario Bros when I was a kid and I never finished it. Adults who still play this game today can beat it fast because they have years of practice and the internet/guides for advice, tell them which warps to take, etc.

I honestly had a lot of trouble getting through games like Sonic 2. If you were to play Sonic 2 end-to-end its probably 3-4 hours. But the reality is getting through it all was challenging. It wasn't 40 hours of puzzles, nono.

This is not to say that that is the right way to make a game, but it was to say that playing it was a challenge for young me. Today the only games I find challenging is PvP games, but often times I don't want the other parts of the challenge like the actual people part. This is why some games like Demon's Souls (the first time I ever saw a castle in the distance that I could literally walk up to and smash through, was an awe moment) still stick in my mind.

> Most games you play nowadays is winnable. And when it isn't people complain why isn't it winnable.

Meh. There’s plenty of modern games where “winning” either is not really a thing (Minecraft, Terraria, dwarf fortress) or is fiendishly difficult (“winning” StS would be semi-reliably killing the heart with any character at maximum ascension, I think just reaching A20 in 50 hours would be impressive).

Yeah. As a kid who spent a lot of time playing games but just wasn't very good at them, I'd pore manuals to look at levels that I knew I'd never reach, and not for lack of trying. I was amazed the first time I played a single player game on the PC (forgot what) and was actually able to see the end! Unless you're into speedrunning, playing the same levels over and over just isn't fun. It's frustrating

Semi-reliably beating the heart on A20 is no more required to beat the game than speed running a competitive time in Dark Souls is.

You can always impose artificial constraints to add more time sinks but that’s on you and your ego not the game.

Old games locked content behind hard challenges, games like StS doesn't. Playing a challenge that doesn't unlock new content is like cooking and then just throwing away the food, it kills the enjoyment for most.

Minecraft and Terraria still have final bosses as well as achievements. You definitely run out of things to do eventually unless you just want to build stuff at the endgame and/or collect every optional item, which can get boring quick for many people. A full run of either is often weeks-long and dozens if not hundreds of hours, but I don't think most people play the same world/character/save forever.

> Minecraft [...] still have final bosses as well as achievements. You definitely run out of things to do eventually unless you just want to build stuff at the endgame and/or collect every optional item,

I don't know about Terraria, but only speedrunners consider the end dragon to be the final boss of the game. Besides the fact that the game has received regular updates with new content (and harder challenges/bosses) for more than a decade since the dragon was added, it's a block game...

> unless you just want to build stuff at the endgame

That's like saying "unless you want to build things with lego." Building things is the point, it should go without saying. Beating the dragon is what players do in the first day playing on a new map to clear the way for the real gameplay. It's a prerequisite (not finish line) for getting a full set of equipment so you can start building in earnest. Beating the ender dragon is like getting the box of legos open and poured onto the floor.

In Minecraft, Survival Mode is the main thing. While you can still build, of course, and you likely will to create a base, I would not say building is actually a major part of the game anymore. Comparing to legos feels a bit off. I played a lot of Minecraft, thousands of hours, a fair bit of that was with mods. A run just tended to peter out after a few weeks. I'm not saying you'd stop at the Ender Dragon either, but once you've done "all the stuff", it's often more fun to either start over or play a different game for a while. I know when hosting servers for a dozen or so active players, most people didn't stick around more than a few weeks, and often they'd ask for a "reset" at some point because the early-game progression was more fun than having a bunch of endgame stuff and not much left to do. Terraria has a much larger focus on combat than Minecraft and many more bosses and clear progression, but I still think of them similarly here. I don't have some 15 year old Minecraft map/server, I have many distinct memories of playing through the game for a while with different people at different times, starting over is just part of it. That goes for Terraria as well, it's borderline taboo to bring a character with progress into a new world if your friend is starting a new character, and if you both had endgame characters it just wouldn't be that interesting. While a speedrunner might skip a lot of the game's content to get to beating the Ender Dragon, a more typical player would probably just get a good mine, good farm, good stockpile of crafting materials, maybe upgrade/rebuild their base once or twice, and eventually not have much left to do. I know there are people building computers in both of these games, but as far as real world cases, almost no one I know even touches Redstone beyond the minimum. I see these more as adventure/sandbox games than building games, even if you can build. I do more terraforming and spelunking than building things just for the sake of it. Expanding your base is often to fit more chests or in the case of Terraria, because you need more places for NPCs to move in so you can access new shops. If building things was a major goal of yours, then it certainly gets easier once you have upgraded movement and mining speed and so on, I just find that I/we usually stop playing around then.

StS = Slay the Spire (I think)

What is StS?

I guess that explains the appeal of the "souls" subgenre of games. But also why it's not for me. I never beat Sonic 2 or Mario 3 as a small child and that was frustrating.

Meanwhile, some of the first games I did beat by myself were Pokemon Silver and Final Fantasy VII. And they both gave me satisfying conclusions to my journey (compared to say, GTA 2, another game I played a lot by myself). And that proceeded to strongly influence the kinds of games I play. not necessarily hard ones, but ones that rewarded my teambuilding (or at least, ability to cheese the mechanics).

A game like GTA 2 (and specially 3) was not meant to be played as-in-the-script, but to fuck around in the city the to have fun and, then, yes, complete the game.

> Most games you play nowadays is winnable. And when it isn't people complain why isn't it winnable.

> Well... It's why they're not impactful.

Today's landscape in of videogame design is much wider than "winnable"/"unwinnable".

There's plenty of "unwinnable" games if one wants nowadays - they're called "hard". There is even the "faithful retro NES" subgenre, which reproduces NES design and difficulty. There are definitely impactful hard games, when well produced (I don't like them, but I guess games like Super Meat Boy have a lot of fans).

There's a reason why, on the other end of the spectrum, there are "easy" games; their objective is to provide an experience rather than a challenge - and also on this side of the spectrum, there is an extreme end - the walking adventures.

Old/unwinnable game of the past doesn't imply "impactful" at all; there was plenty of garbage back then.

There's still plenty of garbage nowadays of course[¹], but there are experience-oriented games that are "impactful" - think of the Bioshock series, or even What Remains of Edith Finch.

There is one aspect of the past that is gone forever, and it's the mystique that some games had for people who couldn't access gaming media.

If, 30+ years ago, one couldn't finish a game (for any reasons), the ending was a mystery. Nowadays, one just looks on Youtube. I have very ambiguous feelings about this, though, as it also carried frustration.

[¹] Although I think that, nowadays, due to the lower bar to production, people with good design skills and poor programming skills, can still produce a remarkable game.

those side scrollers were made following the same model of arcade games, which means you are supposed to 'lose' often so you or somebody elae put another quarter on the machine. It was not an artistic choice like in the Souls games.