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Analysis / Nintendo Hard

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    Serious business 

The primary reason why "Nintendo Hard" became a trope in the first place is rather insidious, and was born out of Nintendo's hardball business practices during the NES era.

As the NES reached the peak of its popularity during 1988 to 1990, Nintendo of America began pushing hard to outlaw video game rentals in the United States. Seriously! Nintendo felt that rentals were robbing them of so many potential cartridge sales, they had to put a stop to it. (Since video game rentals had been successfully outlawed in Japan in 1984, Nintendo of America felt that accomplishing something similar in the US was a reasonable proposition.) Lobbyists were actually hired to advance the issue in Washington, but no politician seemed to be that interested in taking on video game rentals, with none of them believing that they were an outright menace.

Meanwhile, Nintendo of America noticeably began cranking up the difficulty of their new releases during the localization process. Apparently, the idea was that if a game was too difficult to beat during a weekend rental, a player would be more likely to buy the game outright. Third-party developers in particular seemed more prone to this than Nintendo with their own first-party titles; this is understandable when evaluating the situation in perspective, warped as it may be. (A Nintendo-made game is virtually a guaranteed big seller no matter what, but the average third-party title faces stiff competition in the game market and can't risk "losing" any potential sales to rentals.) Nintendo took a firm hand in the QA process of virtually all third-party NES games, so even if a title wasn't developed or published by them, it's a sure bet that Nintendo exerted some level of influence over the finished product.

When comparing the Japanese and American versions of NES games, especially ones not developed by Nintendo themselves, you can see this phenomenon quite clearly: during the early years of the NES (1985-1987), games were routinely made easier during the localization process. Around 1988, as the NES became a cultural phenomenon in the United States, the difficulty-tweaking process became reversed, and "Nintendo Hard" was codified.

It's important to point out that the original Japanese versions of NES games are, by and large, already quite difficult in and of themselves. NOA simply increased the difficulty of many already-challenging games, thereby codifying this trope.

Eventually, NOA and its licensees had to stop this nonsense during the twilight years of the NES circa 1992, as the Sega Genesis appeared and started taking away massive amounts of their market share. (Another, less obvious, reason is that Nintendo had fought tooth and nail to prevent the US release of the Game Genie, but only managed to delay its arrival, albeit for a full year. When the Game Genie finally hit the US market in 1991, Nintendo must have known that the battle against game rentals was decisively lost.) Nevertheless, the legacy of Nintendo's failed crusade is still felt by anyone who revisits the NES library today, and it is the principal reason why no console since the NES has had such a reputation for ridiculously hard games.

    Other notes 

The game mechanics that make a game "Nintendo Hard" were often transported from arcade games that required the player to spend more money to keep playing after his character was killed. Except that when they got ported over to the console, there was no coin slot, leaving you stuck with a fixed number of lives and highly limited or non-existent continues.

The concept has recently been satirized on the Internet, most famously by The Angry Video Game Nerd, who pointed out that via Sturgeon's Law, most examples of Nintendo Hard games are often a result of sloppy or bad design.

A lot of these examples are simply rookie mistakes. For a company, establishing an identity and building the fanbase takes priority over finding the proper challenge level. Often the designers will go for something highly distinctive, take a lot of time designing and making it look right, and not spend enough time on the actual gameplay and level mechanics, then realize too late that they've (completely unintentionally) made a monster. Ghosts 'n Goblins is a good example of this.

A factor that has often been considered to be into play on whether or not the game is actually Nintendo Hard is how huge the development staff behind it was. Many programmers tell that when you are programming a game alone, you usually get pretty good at the game's own mechanics, so much in fact that the difficulty level of your game gets adapted towards your high level of skill. When you are building a game with other people, the entire staff needs to understand the basic mechanics of the game and it is better not to scare them off with high difficulties when you want them to work together with you. This may also be a reason why many NES games were hard, as the creative teams that made them were significantly smaller than those in the current industry.

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