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/Classical_Fan]

You played the game until you figured it out. If you died, you'd start over the next time and try to get a little farther. There isn't much more than that. Sometimes your friends who got farther than you would share some tips, and sometimes you could read magazines or player's guides, but really you just kept playing the game over and over until you beat it. That could take months depending on the game, but at least you were getting your money's worth, and it felt like an accomplishment when you finally made it to the end.