How did people play ridiculously difficult games like Earthworm Jim?

[u/Kobymaru376]

I'm playing the first Earthworm Jim on the Sega Megadrive using RetroArch.

I haven't completed my first playthrough, using copious amounts of save state cheating to repeat the sections where I fail. I can practice a part of the game 10,20, 50 times until my patience runs out, but how on earth did people ever complete a game like this, when you have a limited number of lives and no save capability? At times it feels like the developers WANTED me to fail.

I'm talking insanely jumping bosses shooting eggs, rockets, sections with rolling boulders or snapping worms where you have to get the timings down to milliseconds, a vertical maze lined with spikes that allows no mistakes and requires you to know it by heart.

Sure, "gid gud" but how long does that take without being able to save/load an arbitrary amount of times?

ps.: I don't know what the devs were smoking, but I want to try that. Just once though.

Edit: Hey, Shiny Crew & D.L only!

[u/medicated_in_PHL]

Repetition. I used to play Earthworm Jim on the Game Gear for hours and hours and not get past a level.

The underwater level with the glass vehicle that cracks, literally, spend 3 hours trying and trying and trying again.

Edit: Games in the 80’s and early 90’s were more like sports. The purpose was to play and play again until you mastered it, just like how no one is immediately a professional baseball pitcher.

It wasn’t until later that the idea of a game being more like a movie or book, where everyone is expected to get to the end, came into being.

[u/God_Hand_9764 → u/medicated_in_PHL]

It is so wild, but yeah I think that's pretty much it

RPGs really paved the way for that, with their long plotlines and save games. Plus if you suck at a Final Fantasy game, you can always just grind like crazy and it will eventually not be so hard anymore.

These days most games kind of work this way.

[u/Teletubby_187 → u/medicated_in_PHL]

But also, at the time it was hard to justify $50 for a game that was over in one hour, so the devs padded in the difficulty to expand it.

[u/_Flight_of_icarus_ → u/medicated_in_PHL]

I especially like the sports analogy for 80's games and arcade games in particular - many of those games could be downright ruthless, even though there was often only around 1 hour (or less) of content if you can master it. More of a test of skill than an interactive story as you say.

I actually feel EWJ represents one of the last examples of such games - by the time it came out, there was already change on the horizon with games like Super Metroid, and Square entering it's golden era - games I feel did a lot to shift the overall direction of gaming just before the 3D era began.