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The same way you beat any game in the 1980s and early '90s: lots of pattern memorization based on trial and error. In the arcade, that means lots of quarters.
Once a game like Dragon's Lair was memorized, you could play through the entire thing on only a couple quarters, to the astonishment of arcade bystanders.
Kids and teenagers had more time back then because smart phones and Instagram and YouTube didn't exist. People underestimate what a huge time sink those can be.
No one had Internet access. You could play a game, play an instrument, read a book, go to the mall and the arcade and maybe catch a movie, go outside, or watch whatever happened to be on the 3-4 network TV channels (or possibly cable if your family had the money). And TV back then was mostly terrible.
So if you had $10 in your pocket, that was an entire afternoon of entertainment at the arcade and movie theater.
If you had it down you could beat Dragon's Lair (and Space Ace, and the other Laserdisc games) with a single credit. IIRC there is no randomization within each scene; the only element of randomness was which out of a set of three scenes could play stemming from completing the previous scene. Once you've seen them all they always play out the same way. Further, each scene is only played once per complete game.
I grew up in that era.
I probably dedicated 1000 hours playing the same 4-5 NES games.
I remember playing the original Zelda with self-impose challenges like get hit and start over. I had so much time to kill.
Crazy to think that $10 in 1980 is $40 now
Back when people were making a buck or two an hour though
$3.10 minimum wage in 1980. Equivalent to ~$11.50 per hour today, higher than today's minimum wage.
The effective minimum wage in 2019 was $11.80. It’s important to talk about these things in context, so we are better able to address the correct problem.
Glad ours is $15.45/hr
Yeah I was just commenting on inflation in general
As a child in the 90s, I remember Saturday and Sunday afternoons being incredibly boring if we didn’t go out. TV was shit (still is), and on rainy afternoons you were basically locked at home.
By the late 90s, at age 10, with no internet access in my county, I was mapping ways to beat the Water Temple in Ocarina of Time. I remember scheming for hours, using Farore’s Wind to take me to the beginning of the dungeon and jumping to the platform on the 2nd floor. This way, I was not using the only key I had on the middle pillar, which is what almost everyone got stuck on.
But yeah, I remember the tail-end of this at that time and starting a whole new game to try this out. And it worked. Still proud of 10 year old me. It’s interesting but I hadn’t felt boredom in a really long time.