Rosenau is part of a growing community who are ditching contemporary video games and picking up the consoles from their childhood, or even before their time. And gen Z gamers are following suit, with 24% owning a retro console, according to research by Pringles.
Early games were designed to delight, slightly more modern games are designed to both delight and advertise.
It’s the difference between “I can’t beat this boss so I’d better go level up for 20 mins, ooh I unlocked a new spell” and “I can’t beat this boss I had better prep for a 10 hour grind, this is so I can find the X to craft the Y so I can begin to make the Z which offers me a 1 in 10 chance to unlock the option to craft a new spell… Or I could just pay $5 to skip that bit by buying the spell…”
Minus the “pay $5 to skip” part, retro games are overwhelmingly more likely to be the second than the first. How do you keep someone playing your game for longer than a weekend, in an age where games are 12mb you can’t add new content after you ship? You make your game hard as balls and require a ton of grinding.
Not all games were like this, but tons were. Final fantasy, Ghosts n Ghouls/Goblins, Battletoads, and more all follow this pattern. Even Pokémon isn’t exactly hard but half of the game is just grinding.