Quote Originally Posted by Vivi22 View Post
I'd say it had a lot more to do with games growing out of the arcade scene where easy games wouldn't make money. Even when things moved to home consoles, technical limitations prevented them from making games with tons of content compared to what we're used to now, so it was either make your games really hard, or accept that people probably won't play them for very long, let alone replay them. Look at how long a lot of those games like the original Mega Man's take to beat if you've completely mastered them. I don't think most people would have found them to be an acceptable length if they could do that on the first try and there was no challenge to keep you coming back for more.
That's all true. Mega Man can be speedrun in ~ 30 minutes. So can Dark Souls actually.

There was also accidental, artificial difficulty. I'm thinking about having to spend 10 minutes hitting A if you wanted to buy 99 heal potions in FF1. Or every other game that was fun enough that I wanted to play it, but had such bad controls that it was hard to function in the game. And then the random insane difficulty spikes out of nowhere, like one-hit kills from Sorcerers on the last floor of the last dungeon in FF1.