In a 1980s arcade, every cabinet had to earn its patch of floor. Arcade owners, by most recollections, wanted a quarter to buy two or three minutes of play. Anyone who lasted longer was occupying the machine for free. Switches inside many cabinets let owners set how many lives a coin bought. Atari founder Nolan Bushnell named the design this business needed: easy to learn, hard to master.
When games moved to home consoles, there was no coin slot. The scarce lives stayed anyway, along with few or no "continues," chances to resume after losing. The game was already paid for at the store, so the punishment earned no one money. The players who had learned to beat it supplied a new justification: difficulty was the point, and finishing proved skill.
That justification survives in today's arguments over "assist modes," optional settings that slow a game or make failure cheaper. Celeste calls its difficulty "essential to the experience" and suggests a first run without help, then lets you switch help on anyway. Its makers kept the challenge and dropped the coin-era penalty. The debate since is largely about whether the two can really be pulled apart.
1983: Dragon's Lair charges 50 cents a play, double the usual quarter, and costs arcade owners about $4,300 per cabinet. It still becomes the year's most popular arcade game.
Mid-1980s: Home versions of arcade games and Nintendo jumping games get so punishing that players call them "Nintendo hard." Hardware limits are part of it. So are developers who played through the night until the games felt too easy to them.
2007–2010: I Wanna Be the Guy and Super Meat Boy bring back extreme difficulty, this time on purpose. Fans call the genre "masocore," for the taste for suffering it asks of you.
Jan 25, 2018: Celeste ships with Assist Mode: slower speed, extra mid-air dashes, invincibility, chapter skipping.
June 19, 2020: The Last of Us Part II launches with more than 60 accessibility settings, including for disabled players. One developer said they were about "removing barriers that are keeping players from completing a game."
