HAL was a key piece of the puzzle, to be sure, but no piece was more important than Masahiro Sakurai. With the help of HAL Laboratory, Nintendo was going to do exactly that. The only sensible response, it seemed, was to come up with a game that was both easily playable and fun, something that anyone and everyone could enjoy. Still, Nintendo had a sense that there was an audience out there who could never muster the skills to master games like Zelda or Mario. For example, Super Metroid‘s labyrinth of caves and tunnels might have been dense and intricate, but it was navigable, and the more that people played, the easier it became to traverse. Nintendo’s games could be challenging, but the bulk of them maintained a solid balance between toughness and fairness that allowed them to remain very accessible. 3, Super Metroid, A Link to the Past, and many others had been giving gamers headaches for a good, long while. Though not the toughest titles ever released, games like Mario Bros. Not that Nintendo was any stranger to the world of difficult video games. Nintendo, however, came to believe that video games were becoming too tough, and wanted to find a way to level things out.
Players would be thrust into a game with zero help beyond what was outlined in the instruction manuals ( remember those?), and that was the status quo for years. What’s hard to believe now, though, is there was a time when video games were much the opposite.
It’s this guidance, or handholding, as it’s more derisively referred to by some, that a lot of folks take issue with. Besides the softening of difficulty levels in general, the vast majority of titles today also offer some form of tutorial to help acclimate players to the controls and premise of a given game. If there’s a common complaint amongst gaming’s hardcore community (or seasoned players, as Nintendo likes to call them), it’s that video games have become too easy.
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