Erik_Twice wrote:Let's put it another way. Myst, if played perfectly, takes less than 10 minutes to complete. But it would be absurd to say it only has 10 minutes of content. And a Sudoku takes only a few seconds to fill out if you already know the answer.The same applies to these old games, the actual "content" is not what you do in a perfect play but what you do to get there: The planning and tweaking and skill-improving.
Myst and Sudoku are both really great examples. In hindsight, I made some sweeping generalizations. As far as platformers go (which were probably the most common type of game on NES), I still stand by what I said.
It takes longer to design a game with 20 levels of easy content than it does to design a game of 5 levels of hard content. The game with 20 levels is going to be require more resources: distinct background music for stages, distinct enemies and sprites for each level, play-testing and bug fixes for 20 levels instead of 5, level designs for all of those stages, etc. As a software engineer, I feel very confident making and standing by this statement. Adding more always increases problems and complexity. Always.
This is not to trivialize the process that went into balancing and fine-tuning games -- but I do think it's easy to romanticize about that. Let me put it this way: say you have a game... Castlevania on NES. Great game that's pretty challenging as is. A simple tweak of the difficulty -- say, doubling the damage that every enemy dishes out and also doubling the number of hits required to kill them -- is going to make the game harder and extend the life of the game, right? The margin for error is smaller and so it will require more skill. That's not "more content" though.
NES games existed in a time when people cared about things like high scores. Arcades featured tough games, because revenue was driven by quarters so more deaths meant more money. Games today appeal to a much more mainstream audience. Most of those people don't want challenge, they want fun. They don't want to have to master a level by playing it over and over again while memorize patterns, they want an easy experience that they're able to leisurely play through. Obviously there are exceptions (Dark Souls, etc), but generally games are way more forgiving now with things like liberal checkpoint placement, regenerating health, hand-holding in-game systems (e.g. quest markers in Elder Scrolls), etc...
I think devs used to get by with very little content and push out laughably short games, because that era of gamers wanted challenge, and challenge makes games last a lot longer than they normally would.
