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!
Developers didn't really know what would work and what wouldn't, so they fucked around until they found something. No endless clones of the same idea. Extremely weird gameplay, often utter bullshit, sometimes a gem. It was great.
:-/
In the 70s and 80s, video games were so simple and straightforward, usually due to limited computing power, that it was trivial to create clones of games for other systems. Many of the most popular games of the early years of gaming such as Pong, Frogger, Arkanoid, Centepede, etc. were cloned heavily or were clones themselves.
Case in point, six different Tetris knock offs released between 1989 and 1997.
Another notorious instance was The Simpsons: Road Rage, which was a simple reskin of the then-popular Crazy Taxi.
I'll admit to having done a simple reskin myself, for a high school English project, that involved swapping out PacMan for a boat and the ghosts for angry natives. I christened it "Heart of Darkness: The Video Game" and got an easy A for my trouble.
easy A, huh