Why did so many retro games from the 80s and 90s have such awful game design?

[KrayZ33]

Doors that are blended in with the graphics so they aren't even all that visible, "door mazes" where you enter a door, for 4 more doors to appear and you have to guess which door is the correct one without any clues and then repeat it 4-5 times, obscure items that have no description how to use them and what for to things like in Castlevania where you have to stay still for like 10 seconds before a tornado takes you to the next area.

There are many examples of awful designs in old games, but why were they even there in the first place?

I've heard that it's because of technical limitations, or that games were still in its infancy and they were testing different ideas, and I can accept it for SOME of them, but some things should just be common sense that it's awful design. Like the tornado thing in Castlevania, or doors that doesn't look like doors but part of the environment.

What do you think is the reason for design faults in old games, that can't be excused by tech limitations or testing different ideas?

Because game designers in the 80s and 90s had the ability to try things out and release something without losing money on a massive scale and they also didn't have to fear causing a massive shitstorm that would forever destroy their reputation.
Most of that stuff is basically: "baby did his first game"

If you had to design a Lego set instruction handbook right now, I'm pretty sure there would be plenty of people who couldn't work with what you came up with and couldn't finish the Lego set they bought and would have to finish it on their own somehow.
Stuff like that takes time to develop properly. Not everything they think is good/fun turns out to be good and fun. Something they consider intuitive might actually be the opposite.

[Hellobolis]

i'd say 50/50 technical limitations and very young industry.

limited to 256 or less colors. limited to 1.4 MB or less storage space so even text files add up. 3d was barely a thing, 2d sprites have their limits too.

a lot of those early games also were inspired by things like dungeons and dragons or pick your adventure books, settings where you might find mazes and unidentified items.

[Mic_128]

no old game is actually hard

Hahahaha right. I'm sure you just breezed through Battletoads, Ghost 'N Goblins, Contra, Mario Bros: Lost Levels, Comix Zone, NES Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles...

[Vash The Stampede]

Hahahaha right. I'm sure you just breezed through Battletoads, Ghost 'N Goblins, Contra, Mario Bros: Lost Levels, Comix Zone, NES Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles...

I do this game with my nephews and nieces in that I tell them they get $20 if they can finish the 4th stage of the Lion King on the SNES. They can't get past the 2nd stage and give up. My list of hardest games ever are Contra, Ninja Gaiden series, Battletaods, and Sekiro. Took me like a week to beat the second boss in Sekiro. There are some games that are "harder" but only because of bad game design which once you know how to play those games it isn't hard. The games I listed requires massive skill, and no amount of guides on the internet is going to help you.

[Dhrizzle]

Sometimes it's because developers wanted to extend play so 2 hours of content would last a week, other times it was just poor design because publishers knew they could shovel out any old crap especially if they had a big brand attached.

[XDurionX]

It's the whole "standing on the shoulders of giants" thing. It took a lot of trial & error to get where we are today.

[Sondrelk]

THe most important thing to remember is that there were absolute shit games back then as well.
The consosle many consider the greatest in the golden age of video games might be the PS2, whose games library had some of the best games of its time like the good Star Wars Battlefront 2, or the SSX series, as well as spawning well known series that still go on strong to this day like the Kingdom Hearts series.
However this stellar library of good games comes with an absolute deluge of the shittiest shovelware games you could imagine, games that feel more like Newgrounds Flash games made by a programming intern than anything resembling a good game.

Like all things that people remember were better in the past that is more on people remembering the things that were well made and forgetting the shit.
The Colosseum is not necessarily a sign that Romans built a sturdier building that we do now, but rather that the Colosseum was well enough built that it was not demolished like 99.999% of all other contemporary buildings.

[khazmodan]

Early console games were designed in a similar fashion to arcade games at the time; meaning, they had plenty of pitfalls to get more money (quarters) out of you. It took some time for developers to break from that trend, and eventually that arcade mentality faded. Fast forward 2020, industry went full circle and went hardcore arcade on us again: DLC, Cash Shop, Boosts, Loot Boxes, etc..

Interesting point, and so true about coming full circle, maybe the pendulum has to drive out the shallow finance idiots before we get to see another renaissance of game design.

[Magical Mudcrab]

Of course you are right in that, but some design faults back then were on such a level that they shouldn't even have been made in the beginning. They are really on a "What is this? Are you stupid? How did you even come up with something that stupid?"-level. Like doors you can't even see because it blends in perfectly with the foliage and such.

Sure, but this is just post hoc reasoning based on experiences with a game industry with 30 years of learning. Game studios of the past did not have the wellspring of knowledge to draw upon, nor did they have the loose technical limitations that we have now. They were both limited in their ability (due to lack of experience and reference material) and technologically. Thinking that the design of some of those games is awful is great and all, but wondering why it happened and expecting developers to understand an industry before it has even formed is silly.

[exochaft]

Hahahaha right. I'm sure you just breezed through Battletoads, Ghost 'N Goblins, Contra, Mario Bros: Lost Levels, Comix Zone, NES Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles...

I've had my kid try old games from the NES/SNES era, and even he says they're much harder than a lot of games today. Sometimes it's the games have bad/unresponsive controls, sometimes it legitimately takes more skill and/or reaction time than many games require nowadays. Doesn't mean there weren't a plethora of easy games, either. The hindsight viewing of difficulty can be hard to gauge, especially if you've played a game to death or every secret/optimization has been done. It's like going back to Classic WoW: the experience is very different from vanilla because everything is min/maxed, something that wasn't done at the time.

Another aspect of games from the 80's/90's that made them more difficult than what you get today is save states and/or checkpoints galore. That's certainly a hardware limitation of the times, and the ability to save a game was pretty limited (and if the battery died in a cartridge, that was pretty much no saving for that game). However, it did foster players to actually get good at a game in order to progress. Fast forward to today, and it's hard to find a game that doesn't let you spam-save your game to where you're saving every few seconds in a hard game instead of re-tackling the difficult parts from the start. There's even games that hold your hand to the point that if you fail, the save state 'skips' the content or makes it easier the next part around. That's a far cry from "game over, start from the beginning of the game and try again" that many early games had. Even from a time management aspect, if you were playing some games from the early days you had to plan out how much time you needed to play through because you couldn't stop and/or save the game.

Here's the dirty little secret about difficulty: it's not the sole arbiter of whether a game is good or fun. Some of my favorite games are from the SNES era, and while I could play them blind-folded, they still are fun and engaging to play. I still regularly play through games like Super Metroid even though there's no chance of my dying nowadays. Some more recent games have a focus on difficulty as one of the main aspects of the game, such as Dark Souls or Sekiro, but over time even those games will become less and less difficult the more you play them and figure out the game. However, even when the difficulty isn't as great as it once was at first contact with the game, a good or great game is still fun to play despite the relative change in difficulty.

As a slight aside, there are some documentaries about iconic games and the game-making process for some classic games from the 80's and 90's, and I'd say the source of many (not all) flaws is likely hardware restrictions. There's always going to be corporate influence, but as is the case with TV/movies from the same era, games had much more freedom to not play it safe and experiment than what you get nowadays. If anything, the corporate influence is much worse at influencing games nowadays than it was back in the 80's/90's as a general statement, and this is why games from that era could range from complete flops to legendary/timeless. Current games tend to be very safe and bland compared to the potential of what could be made back in the 80's/90's (or even the early 2000's). Exceptions do apply, of course, but you'll find the common theme of good current games is that their design philosophy reverts back to what created the great games of the 80's/90's.

Part of the problem is the customer, as well, as many people have gotten into the habit of praising mediocrity or enabling game practices that don't result in games getting better. It's like people complaining about microtransactions in games, but the only reason they exist is because customers use microtransactions... if they didn't make money, they wouldn't be in the game. Not saying it's the same people (although I know plenty of people who complain about MTX yet shell over cash every chance they get into MTX), but overall the customer base is likely much more willing to cave than demand a better game standard.

[Vash The Stampede]

Sometimes it's because developers wanted to extend play so 2 hours of content would last a week, other times it was just poor design because publishers knew they could shovel out any old crap especially if they had a big brand attached.

"These kinds of things are meant to elongate a game they are made to manipulate you into thinking you are achieving something more than you are achieving. What huh? What? I eh, what? An element in a game that wasn't solely made for me to have fun? OH NO! That's no."

[FKemp]

The game design nowadays isn't much better in most games, developers just shifted their focus from trying to get players to spend more time in their game to trying to get players to spend money in their game to save time.

[Vash The Stampede]

The game design nowadays isn't much better in most games, developers just shifted their focus from trying to get players to spend more time in their game to trying to get players to spend money in their game to save time.

Ubisoft games come to mind. That's the whole premise of selling players an XP boost in order to progress faster in games. It's still bad game design, but it's not as obvious to todays players because they can pay to make things faster. Developers still have the task of making a game that used to be finished in a weeked be done in a month, and that's usually done with copy and paste content. Instead of doing what games did in the past where you run around looking for a door and trying to find something that is so obscure that it might as well not exist outside of a strategy guide, to collect items and copy and paste quests. Same goal, just different ideas.

[loras]

Doors that are blended in with the graphics so they aren't even all that visible, "door mazes" where you enter a door, for 4 more doors to appear and you have to guess which door is the correct one without any clues and then repeat it 4-5 times, obscure items that have no description how to use them and what for to things like in Castlevania where you have to stay still for like 10 seconds before a tornado takes you to the next area.

There are many examples of awful designs in old games, but why were they even there in the first place?

I've heard that it's because of technical limitations, or that games were still in its infancy and they were testing different ideas, and I can accept it for SOME of them, but some things should just be common sense that it's awful design. Like the tornado thing in Castlevania, or doors that doesn't look like doors but part of the environment.

What do you think is the reason for design faults in old games, that can't be excused by tech limitations or testing different ideas?

You ever interacted with a bunch of game programmers? Oftentimes they've about as strong a connection to reality as the games they make.
Not in the same way mind you, they're completely aware of what's real and not and all that, however they do frequently suffer a disconnect in regards to what is intuitive to normal people; they've made it and have gotten used to it, hence whatever weirdness is put in there it seems to be perfectly functional to them. But then reality comes along whenever their products are exposed to the real world.

Over time programming has become more mainstream, there's less and less programming skill required. That has obvious upsides in how many people can create stuff and how "normal" the average programmer is nowadays, but it's also got plenty of downsides with degraded technical know how (you can get away with far poorer practice) and more influence from social processes as the community's bigger, which constrains creativity ("monkey see monkey do" is a very strong homogenizing impulse).

So yeah: The obvious failures are likely a product of the differing demographic back then, as well as of evolving insights of course.

[leorana]

Developers wanted people to talk outside the game to figure it out which helps their game sell by word of mouth.

Not sure if that was their intention, considering hardly existing internet and games were separately bought or physically swapped/traded but as I recall - it did happen.

I can clearly remember the need to draw a map to the caves in legends of Kyrandia that passed around carfelly amongst my friends.

[NineSpine]

You ever interacted with a bunch of game programmers? Oftentimes they've about as strong a connection to reality as the games they make.
Not in the same way mind you, they're completely aware of what's real and not and all that, however they do frequently suffer a disconnect in regards to what is intuitive to normal people; they've made it and have gotten used to it, hence whatever weirdness is put in there it seems to be perfectly functional to them. But then reality comes along whenever their products are exposed to the real world.

Over time programming has become more mainstream, there's less and less programming skill required. That has obvious upsides in how many people can create stuff and how "normal" the average programmer is nowadays, but it's also got plenty of downsides with degraded technical know how (you can get away with far poorer practice) and more influence from social processes as the community's bigger, which constrains creativity ("monkey see monkey do" is a very strong homogenizing impulse).

So yeah: The obvious failures are likely a product of the differing demographic back then, as well as of evolving insights of course.

Design and engineering are two different jobs, and they were back then too. Sometimes someone fills both roles at very small companies, but it’s not the norm. Shigeru Miyamoto didn’t program Mario or Zelda.

A lot of the obtuseness of old games simply comes from bad translation and cultural concepts not matching up. When a game is very technically limited, cultural understanding becomes significantly more important, because the visual and audio cues become much more difficult to recognize for an outsider.

[CastletonSnob]

Weren't games in the NES era really hard because games were short, so developers made them hard so players would get their money's worth?

[Mokrath]

Doors that are blended in with the graphics so they aren't even all that visible, "door mazes" where you enter a door, for 4 more doors to appear and you have to guess which door is the correct one without any clues and then repeat it 4-5 times, obscure items that have no description how to use them and what for to things like in Castlevania where you have to stay still for like 10 seconds before a tornado takes you to the next area.

There are many examples of awful designs in old games, but why were they even there in the first place?

I've heard that it's because of technical limitations, or that games were still in its infancy and they were testing different ideas, and I can accept it for SOME of them, but some things should just be common sense that it's awful design. Like the tornado thing in Castlevania, or doors that doesn't look like doors but part of the environment.

What do you think is the reason for design faults in old games, that can't be excused by tech limitations or testing different ideas?

A lot of it was translation errors when games were released in English.
Castlevania 2 is notorious for it's bad translation, resulting in the NPC clues meaning nothing.
I also think a lot of it was to push things like Nintendo Power and their strategy guides. They put a lot of really obscure stuff in games that outside of random freak accidents nobody would ever discover without a guide. This trend has continued on for quite some time, and games still release with really vague items or "hidden" things with zero clues in the actual game.

[Dhrizzle]

Weren't games in the NES era really hard because games were short, so developers made them hard so players would get their money's worth?

Partly. A lot of game design was based on the arcades so they had mechanics like limited lives and "unfair" deaths to keep people pumping money into the machines.

[Greyvax]

a good example of the maze mentioned in the OP is King's Quest V. That was nightmare fuel, until you realized that the orientation changed everytime you walked through a door (facing east, facing north, etc..).