Garcian Smith said:
Wrong. Actually, the NES was considered "casual" in its time, while arcade games (the dominant form of gaming at the time) were the "hardcore." Had you been alive when the NES was released, you'd have heard all sorts of talk about how the NES and those new easy, kiddy, casual games where you go from point A to point B (some of them - gasp - don't even have high score charts!) were killing and "casualizing" gaming. End result: Some "hardcore" adapted; others clung bitterly to their style of games until the market for them dwindled down into nothingness. How's that for a modern-day parallel? |
Garcian, Ive been around longer than Star Wars movies have. I lived with the Atari 2600, ColecoVision, etc. At the time of the NES, arcades were still stuck in Atari Mode - simple games that just got harder and harder each level due to more enemies that moved faster. The core market grew with games like Metroid and Zelda, which alienated the casual gamer due to the amount of length, diverse maps, etc. From the industry side, your point is inverted, as industry vets cite the NES as the first the world has seen of "hardcore" gaming. Arcades were too simplistic compared to the large scale design that NES games had.
In essence, its more like Nintendo has come full circle bringing the era of core console gaming to the world and looping back to the casual, arcade-ish style of gaming that existed before the NES
