so, I've been playing my switch at work a bunch this week, and I have been playing all the OG mario games in the all stars pack on the SNES emulator. and holy shit these games are hard. like they start so fucking easy, but then the games are like oh? you think you're hot shit? and just throw the most bullshit gotchas to kill you out of nowhere that you have no clue of unless you died there before or have played this game before.
so, boomers, how the fuck did you beat these games when you were like 9 in 1987 or w/e. there's no way kids were expected to beat this shit right? have I just been raised on participation trophy ass zoomer games from the late 90s and early 2000s???
With bigass guide books like this . Some games were impossible to beat without their aid and there were no other resources to turn to. Super helpful and well laid out too. Also cheat codes (like the legendary up-up-down-down-left-right, etc) propagated through school yards. Later on, stuff like Game Genie got popular. I think around the tail end of the SNES era was when the web was becoming mainstream so everyone could just go on AOL or whatever and find tips and cheats.