> 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.