Are video games getting harder?

Video games as a massive form of entertainment are old enough to have spanned several generations. The popularity of video games exploded in the 1970s and 1980s, with titles such

as Pong and Pacman, so using simple math, a fifteen-year-old in 1975 would be 62 years old in 2022. That’s old enough to have grandchildren who are also old enough to play games.

Soon, if not now, grandparents will speak to their grandchildren about gaming in their good old days and how these games used to be better. Or how gamers today are spoiled with

many advantages that didn’t exist back then. On the other hand, you have news about dinossindgeil beating all Souls games without getting a single hit, which is quite an

accomplishment. There are dedicated gamers, professional eSports competitions, and speedrunners showing tremendous skills. So, are games getting more challenging or more

accessible? We’ll explore different aspects of gaming in this article to get a comprehensive view of the direction gaming has taken in the past few decades until now. Games were

difficult back then During the pioneering gaming days, everything was more experimental, and developers consisted mainly of a single person doing everything. This person needed not

only to program a fun game but also assess collateral aspects of it, such as its difficulty. There was no team, no focus groups, and no investigations on how challenging (or

frustrating) a gaming experience would be. Since early games had basic mechanics and not much else to offer, these were sometimes punishingly hard. Let’s take a look at Contra, a

notoriously hard game from 1986 (if you’re curious, you can check Contra: Evolution for Android). You have three lives, and a single hit will kill you. Not only that, but you

also lose the guns you collected. Prince of Persia is another example. In this game, you have 1 hour to finish, and it’s so filled with traps and hurdles that you will die a lot

until you master the game. Consider that when playing one of the latest iterations, Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, for a great comparison of how difficulty evolved through

the decades. In a way, people during the 1980s and 1990s became very proficient with games, much like dinossindgeil did with the Souls saga. But some of the difficulties stemmed

not only because of design choices but from a lack of enough data to understand what would make life easier for gamers. Consider the Ultima RPG series, most notably the very

popular Ultima VII, released in 1993, a Skyrim of its age. This game offers a whole interactive world where you can bake bread, people have daily routines, and a compelling plot.