cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/13809164
Ignoring the lack of updates if the game is buggy, games back then were also more focused on quality and make gamers replay the game with unlockable features based on skills, not money. I can't count the number of times I played Metal Gear Solid games over and over to unlock new features playing the hardest difficulty and with handicap features, and also to find Easter eggs. Speaking of Easter eggs, you'd lose a number of hours exploring every nook and cranny finding them!
I've grown up in the land of pirate cartridges with no booklets, so never knew any lore about Mario games besides “the princess got kidnapped”. Didn't discover that the enemies had names until I was an adult.
Oh boy, you didn't even get the bad b&w photocopy manual? Those came with rentals a lot of times. There was a lot of pointless info too though, like grand descriptions of the starting equipment you ditch after the first half hour lol.
We had nothing outside the games back then, and no boxes for the carts either. But OTOH the pirate cartridges often had multiple games on them — up to like a dozen decent ones on a NES cart, or straight up a hundred variations of the same few base games, particularly old and smaller ones from the early 80s. I think the variations were made by modifying some variables before launching the base game: changing the speed, starting level or whatever.
I was occasionally reading magazines about games, and encountering names of enemy characters from a platformer that I've played a hundred times would make me go “what the hell are they talking about”. Apparently rich kids in the big city could afford genuine games with the manuals.