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