Survivorship bias doesn’t make sense in this context, because I actually lived then and played hundreds of games. Plenty were buggy as hell (notice I said game-breaking bugs specifically), but none were unplayable (well, not because of bugs anyway). I hear Battletoads on NES was uncompleteable 2 player, but my brother and I never made it to level 11 together to find out.
And as a result, the vast majority of games didn’t have game-breaking bugs at launch, unlike today.
I think this view has heavy survivorship bias. There were many broken or heavily bugged games shipped.
Survivorship bias doesn’t make sense in this context, because I actually lived then and played hundreds of games. Plenty were buggy as hell (notice I said game-breaking bugs specifically), but none were unplayable (well, not because of bugs anyway). I hear Battletoads on NES was uncompleteable 2 player, but my brother and I never made it to level 11 together to find out.
Actually true. The number of (S)NES games with game-breaking bugs was near-zero. Probably because they couldn’t just patch them later.
Games were also limited to “See if you can jump over this wall! Now see if you can do it again in a different color!”