For real how did “Hey let’s waste the player’s time if they die” ever catch on. Starting in the 80s we spent like 3 decades moving away from that.

We solved that in the 90s through things called cheat codes. Or more specifically, extra lives and level select cheats. And a lot of xennial/millennial g*mers hate admitting this, but the reason why we were able to play and beat those hard^TM games was because we first beat them with cheat codes and we slowly eased on the amount of cheats we needed until we practiced playing through the game enough that we could finally beat it without cheats. That’s more or less how I played through the Doom shareware.

G*mers still care about game difficulty in 2025 as if every game doesn’t become hard^TM if you’re trying to speedrun it at WR pace. Any moderately popular game will have WR times that would take hundreds of hours for someone who’s not part of that speedrunning community to even crack at.

But of course, most g*mers don’t actually want hard^TM games, but games that celebrate their mediocrity. Notice how “git gud” didn’t come from any speedrunning community but from a franchise community that inflates the difficulty of their games even though those games sell millions of copies.