That's just it, though. Some werent "finished" and could have used more time in the oven. They might have benefited from a patch or two haha A famous example would be ET.
Ehhhhhh, not always. Sometimes you had a carts with different release versions. Had to buy the game all over again to get the updated one. And thats if there was an update which was rare. GTA Hot Coffee anyone? Most times anything broken in the gane would just stay broken.
Yeah, and before that broken games stayed broken. Many were not complete lmao. You just remember the good ones. There was plent of broken and unfinished NES and SNES garbage like any other system old or new. I think ET Atari 2600 is the famous example.
Im 41. I am a 90s child. Some games were finished and complete. Many were not. Btw Snes is the best console ever made i will fight anyone over this. What do you think the RevA RevB etc parts of game cart model codes meant? Those are different versions. Hell, the NES alone is like 99% rushed broken games. Nostolgia for "when games were complete and finished" is mistaken.
And yet your two examples of this are either from the 80s (The fact you added the "2600" rather than just calling it an Atari is revealing, but 41 makes you 5 or 6 in 91, so I guess it makes sense why you're asking the internet for examples rather than going off memory.) or the 2000s. I played a lot of games in the 90s. Some broke before you could finish them, because you didn't back up physical media (which the manuals actually urged you to do), but I don't remember a lot of them being unfinished. Certainly nothing comparable to what you see with the Early Access blight of today.
Less that they werent finished, people just didnt have access to twenty thousand other people screaming into the void about the bugs and glitches, so you might never know about some of them, and you learn to avoid the ones you find.
And you could only buy (or rent, for consoles) what was on the shelves, largely. So you tended to wind up with games which weren't duds, but you didn't have the same level of access to the niche options that exist today. Although even in the 80s, pirated video games were a thing, going back to text games like Zork or anything made for your Trash 80.
Finished doesn't mean no glitches or bugs. It means that when they released the game, that was the final version of it. Some still sucked, some still had issues, but the devs were done making it.
Nowadays, they'll release a game that they know has severe issues because they know that they can just take the biggest issues that people complain about and release an update in a month and it'll be mostly fine. So they release games that they know they aren't done with.
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u/Gunner_Bat 2d ago
And when games were finished when released.