Unfair Design

Hello and welcome back to Eccentric Spheres.

Today I have to keep it a bit on the short side. I caught a nasty little flu last week, and the bastard is still kicking my ass all over the place.

Anyway, I ran across this video called “Devs Play”, over at DoubleFineProd's channel on Youtube. If you go to about the 18 minute mark, the developer of the old Lion King console game talks about how they were ordered by Disney to make the early game really hard to play.

The reason for this is, or rather was, the rental market. Back in the day when rentals were the big thing, the movie industry got a slice of every rented movie, but no one got anything for rented games. So the clever chaps over at Disney figured out that if you put in a huge spike in difficulty around level two, renters would get frustrated and go out and buy the game, in order to finish it.

Now, my brother and I used to rent a console and some games every now and then. Usually the SNES, but even the old NES once or twice, and I remember how this actually was a thing. In the Aladdin game, in order to escape the Cave of Wonders, you have to ride the magic carpet while lava chunks fly at you at high speeds. It was insanely hard to try to remember the pattern, and I suspect this artificial difficulty spike was the reason.

If this strategy actually worked or not, I can't say. I doubt anyone can, but for us it didn't work. Seeing as we rented the console as well, there was no way we would ever buy the game anyway. If it was too hard, we would just shrug and put it down in order to play something else.

The video is pretty interesting, so check it out.

I'm off to do some more coughing and sneezing, but I'll see you next time. Until then, have a great week!

Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kILeyo1iv0A&feature=youtu.be&t=1085