What happened to "Nintendo Hard?"
Fast forward to today and you’ll be surprised to see a game that doesn’t have a difficulty setting. Most people plow through a game on normal or the newly coined “casual” setting, but some of us who were raised on the Nintendo Hard games go straight for the more difficult settings, most of which do not even compare to the NES default setting in terms of difficulty.
Like any growing market the goal of the video game industry was to grow and convert non-users to users. In order to get people to play games that otherwise wouldn’t, you have to make it more accessible. We’ve all witnessed what happens when someone who has never played a game like Street Fighter is broken in by the local master. In this scenario the new player nearly always gets frustrated and quits. Since their first experience was so negative they’ll likely never play that particular title again. The lesson here is that if an individual’s experience is largely negative they won't give it another try. Likewise, if games remained Nintendo Hard it would be just as difficult to penetrate the non-gaming community as it would be to get to the end of Blaster Master.
Games became easier in order to make the gaming experience more accessible and satisfying for a larger audience: learning curves were made more gradual, in-game tutorials became standard and the average difficulty of titles was lowered. The self proclaimed ‘hardcore’ gamers will refer to this as the dumbing down of the game industry, but in reality this was a smart move by the industry that helped to propel it into the mainstream of pop culture.
This culminated in Nintendo’s “Blue Ocean” strategy with the DS and Wii – a system with games that targeted a much broader spectrum of demographics with concepts like tennis and bowling that could easily be picked up and played in groups. This strategy has helped to make the Wii the best selling console of this generation and has led to Microsoft’s development and push of the Kinect, which has also been seen as quite successful.
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