Most of the games I played back in the day had some way of resuming your progress at a later date, whether that was an actual save system, a password system, or even a hidden warp zone. What were you supposed to do for longer games that had no way at all of resuming your progress after switching the console off? Get good enough at the start of it that you could play the game faster and eventually complete it in one go, or just leave the console on overnight and continue the next day?
(and yes, my Mega Drive is currently sitting powered on because I couldn’t think of a better way to keep my progress)
Leave it on for weeks and pray it didn’t freeze or someone shut it off.
More quarters and level codes.
In one sitting. You’d have to get good at them by playing them over and over and over again. And they were really hard so that it would take a long time to get that good.
This was intentional. Games from the 80s had a lot more technical limitations compared to today and this was a way to increase their replay value. Otherwise you’d spend $30 on a game ($93 today) and beat a game in a couple tries, and it wouldn’t be worth it.
There were some games you were supposed to complete in one shot. The one from my childhood that comes to mind was Super Double Dragon on the SNES. It was built like an arcade game, you got so many lives at the start, and you had to beat it in that many lives. Your health on your current life would be recharged on each new level. The game had seven levels.
Others had password systems. They weren’t really passwords; what they were was basically a hash or encrypted string that represented the game’s state. Depending on the game, at the end of a level, or at any point during gameplay in the pause menu or something, it would display a password which you then wrote down on a piece of paper with a pen like a Mesopotamian. Restarting the game, you could find a password entry screen that would launch the game with those parameters. Metroid on the NES worked this way, and it was early enough and popular enough to become kind of infamous for it, Metroid included the entire alphabet, number and some symbols, so you could spell entire words, some of which produced interesting results. ENGAGE RIDLEY MOTHER FUCKER is technically invalid but it generates interesting results, as does MOTHER BRAIN? FUCKIN TOASST. A young man named Justin Bailey found that his name works surprisingly well, and NARPAS SWORD0 000000 000000 must have been hard-coded. These passwords got passed around and even printed in the gaming press, so later games omitted vowels from their password system to prevent them from spelling coherent words.
Still others hid secrets that allowed skilled or knowledgeable players to skip levels. The poster child here is of course Super Mario Bros; they figured newer players would play the first few levels to the point they gained proficiency, and then would discover the warp zones that let them warp ahead, thus skipping the parts of the game they’ve played already.
I got an NES shortly after it came out and only found out in the last few years that you can hold A when pressing start on the Continue screen to start over at either the level or stage you died on (forget which).
We only had Super Mario, Duck Hunt, and The Legend of Zelda for years. You just had to get good. I had hand drawn maps, diagrams, and notes for everything.
This is what people also forget. You got 2 or 4 games in a normal household (for me , Mario, duck hunt, skate or die, hook) Now with unlimited game collections its hard to imagine.
The Legend of Zelda was, as far as I’m aware, the first ROM cartridge-based game with a built-in save feature.
