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Some random thoughts...

(I was a kid in the 80s and I played in arcades a lot. I think I could still tell in which arcade I played each game).

> There was an economic motivation for this difficulty, in getting more coins from players quicker, but Fujiwara would later insist that wasn’t the primary motivation and that they were meeting a demand from strong players for challenge.

Thats' not completely true. If it was that way, players would quickly grew fed up and stop playing. You need a balance between getting money out of people and people keep playing because they have fun.

I think one of the most efficient way to do that is having MOST of your players being suckers that keep pouring money, but allow a few to get very good at it, and play an inordinate amount of time with a single coin. That way the suckers will keep playing hoping to do the same. Most people would last 5 level in Bubble Bobble, but you had the occasional "genius" that would finish it.

Very difficult games like GnG were well regarded but not as played as others, as much as I can remember.

> Fujiwara later responded to a question about SNK’s Ikari and its resemblance to Commando by saying that was just how things were, although he was disappointed that they had got to release more sequels than him.

In the 80's there were not many game mechanics available []. I dare say that 90% of the games were either

vertical shoot 'em ups (think Galaxian) * horizontal shoot 'em ups (think Gradius) * beat 'em ups (think Double Dragon) * platform (think Mario) * to a lesser extent, racing games (think Outrun)

I think mostly due to HW limitations.

So if you are going to have a soldier going around killing people, of course it is going to resemble Command in some way. Doesn't mean they are the same, in the same way that Poker and Bridge are not the same despite using the same set of cards.

[*] There were some outliers, and some of them were great (Tron, Star Wars) but they more the exception that the rule.

Yes this is what made GnG and other difficult games like it great. While some games balanced the financial side on forced limited play time, e.g. timers or constant depleting health, others like GnG were just hugely difficult. You can play for 4 minutes or 40 depending on skill.

As a kid with no money, I learned to get good at these and avoid the obvious cash crabs

Also it was impressive when someone was good enough to play 40 minutes. Usually a small crowd would gather, which could inspire bad players to plunk in more quarters to improve.

I remember beating Zaxxon when I was only 6 years old in '82, in large part because I probably spent at least 100 hours watching older kids do it.

Speaking of Ghosts n' Goblins - there was a discussion on HN not too long ago about platformer controls in old video games (air control vs. non–air control), and how being able to control your character in the air mostly won out.

As someone who grew up playing the excruciatingly difficult NES version of Ghouls ’n Ghosts, can't say I'm sorry to see that mechanic go the way of the Atari Jaguar.

> excruciatingly difficult

As the author of the article notes, the NES was not popular in the UK or Europe as a whole, and indeed, I've still never seen one in the flesh, so to speak.

But we did have arcades in the town I grew up in, and when Ghosts n' Goblins was current, I can remember discussing it with another kid in our schoolyard. He told me that someone he knew had made it all the way to the end of the game. Totally agog, I asked what happened when you completed it, and he told me, "There's a message that says, "This was all an illusion created by Satan." And then you have to do it all over again."

I was privately skeptical that this could be true, because I couldn't believe that the programmers would be that mean, but also because the game was so bloody difficult. I didn't believe that anyone actually could make it all the way through, unless they had a six foot-high pile of ten pence pieces.

But about fifteen years later, I discovered MAME and ROM repositories, and with the aid of its cheat system, I pushed through to the bitter end of Ghosts n' Goblins. And damned if I wasn't rewarded with the message, "This was all an illusion created by Satan."

Tokuro Fujiwara, j'accuse.

Whenever a friend complains about how much they hate games with boss rushes (a mechanic to artificially inflate the length of a game by forcing the player to re-fight all the previous bosses from previous levels in order) - I refer them to the "illusion moment" in Ghosts 'n Goblins.

> I pushed through to the bitter end of Ghosts n' Goblins. And damned if I wasn't rewarded with the message, "This was all an illusion created by Satan."

Weeell...here's the thing. Erm. You didn't push through to the end. You just got the "bad" ending.

The game does very much have a proper ending, and reaching it is surprisingly straightforward.

You just have to beat it twice.

Sure, I get that. I was just aiming for comic effect in pointing out that the player's initial reward for having made it through all the levels of a very difficult game is "lol, do it again".

I did work my way through it a second time to see the "proper ending", and what's interesting is that I remember nothing about it. There's a moral in there, somewhere.

The NES is historically amongst the most popular consoles sold in Europe, but with huge differences between countries. In some countries, every kid either had or wanted one, while in others, micros and/or Sega were dominant.

"Most sold" doesn't really tell much though.

The NES was pretty popular in the UK, wasn’t it? In our solidly working-class home, we had a NES. I remember getting Super Mario Bros 3 for christmas one year and so did many of my friends at school, who all lived in semi-detached two-bedroom homes or masonettes. So, we weren’t in a wealthy bubble or anything. I’m sure it sold multiple millions of copies in the UK and TV shows like GamesMaster were popular and had NES games on a show watched by a pretty big audience. How old were you when it released that you’ve never seen one in the flesh?

Okay, that's interesting. I was in my early teens when it was released. Absolutely everyone I knew had either a Spectrum or a C64, aside from the one rich kid who owned a BBC Micro.

I just had a look at Wikipedia, which says, "the NES performed less well in Europe, where it faced strong competition from the Master System and home computers such as the Commodore 64 and ZX Spectrum."

This is a interesting long read on the subject: https://fatnickindustries.com/Blog/2019/07/03/8-bit-showdown...

The NES did get past a million sales in the UK, but a lot of them seem to have been at a cheap price late in its life once the SNES and (more so) the Mega Drive had established a popular market for consoles in the UK.

An indicative fact on consoles vs computers that the article highlights: in 1991, Sonic the Hedgehog on Mega Drive reached #11 in the UK charts on its release, and it was considered a remarkable and unusual achievement for a console game to do so well.

Just want to say, I hadn't encountered your website before, but it's an absolute treat.

I'll be working my way through your Timeline over the next while!

Thank you! I hope you enjoy

Great article! Interesting to see they were still selling the SMS for 10% of the price of the Saturn at the same time.

I got one about 1992ish I think. I had a Gameboy before that. And a spectrum before that. To be honest the game boy was a revelation, smooth fun polished games. My spectrum crashed all the time (thanks Alan sugar and your cheaper manufacturering). Nintendo games had multi person dev teams instead of some poor guy looking at a video of an arcade machine and trying to recreate at on a spectrum.

Though everyone I knew got a snes and street fighter 2 for Xmas one year. I only knew one other nes owner

To be fair, we are talking about arcade games. You were not supposed to finish them, but to finish your money before that :-) [].

You are paying for a game, so you have the right to continue playing until you die. In that context, restarting the game (hopefully with an higher difficulty level) is the proper course of actoin

[] The authors of Pacman probably didn't even think you would be able to reach level 256 and overflow the variable. That's how you get to a kill screen that corrupts memory.

I was on the other side of this, playing Castlevania Symphony of the Night in elementary school. One day I discover something that my friend never found, even though I looked up him, since he completed the whole game.

Well what I discovered was the reverse castle and another 50% of the game he never played. I called him on the landline and started telling him about it and he was saying "what are you even talking about", he thought I was lying until he followed my instructions.

That thing settled exploration as one if my favorite thing in videogames, the discovery was amazing

I have been playing that game since I was like 10 and I've never gotten past the fucking ghost ship.

I think anyone who says they've beat it is a dirty filthy liar. It cannot be bested.

And I'm with you, the one chance to point your jump in the right direction was INFURIATING.

The PSP version of this game was a lot of fun, if frustrating in how the "random spawn" of enemies really cut against some of the difficulty. In particular, it would really suck to have a random spawn come in where your jump was taking you.

すぐ死ね Sugu shinu The die quickly game

As a kid I spent a lot of money with the arcade version, finding it very difficult. Reaching the second or third stage was quite challenging, I was always hoping to find the knives as a weapon.

"Cut a stout blackthorn to banish ghosts and goblins"

The game always made me think of this line too. I wonder if they had it in mind when they came up with the name.

A brand new pair of brogues, rattlin' o'er the bogs...

Frightenin' all the dogs, on the Rocky Road to Dublin

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocky_Road_to_Dublin

A classic I only know because it was in the RDJ Sherlock Holmes movie.

The High Kings do a good version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0QdbeM2JWYE