From the operators manual to Ghosts 'n' Goblins, but this was in the manuals for a few other games Romstar distributed in the US, like Toaplan's Out Zone.
I mean, some of the first, if not the first, microtransactions were field tested in the US version of Double Dragon 3! Not to mention the similar levels of flash and polish that go into arcade and mobile game's visual stylings.
And yet the myth of arcade games being "perfectly fair and built for 1cc" persists. I suspect there's a few reasons for this:
- People are simply remembering the best games from that era.
- People forgot how many quarters they had to sink in to get their first 1cc.
- People casually ignore fighting games when discussing "fairness".
- People are remembering the home port and not the original arcade game.
- Most people's experiences with arcade games are via emulation.
If you spent actual time in an arcade during their heyday, you'd know that most games were way harder than the default DIP settings would lead you to believe. And for every top tier game, you had five or six quarter munching fighters, lightgun games, or early 80s "classics" to go with it. Even the best games weren't worth bothering with after the first two or three stages anyway, because the developers clearly ran out of ideas by that point and the only thing that lied ahead was quarter trap after quarter trap.
That said, one way they do differ from modern mobile games is turnaround time. For example, the "pay to play" nature of arcade games perfectly explains the rise of fighting games. Not only was turnaround much higher (rounds were often over in seconds), but the competitive nature of the genre meant you'd likely be getting twice as many quarters for the same amount of time. Anyone who has played an arcade fighter solo can tell you horror stories about how brutal the AI was, or how awful the final bosses were, which often disregarded the rules of the game entirely.
On this note, but the recent Out Zone re-release ran into some mild controversy over the devs using the most commonly available version of the game, rather than the later revision that everyone emulated because that was the only version people had played. Turns out the developers of the remaster were using a stitched together frankenrom based on an incomplete revision with DIP settings that were out of whack! See the first comment on this post for more info.
I could go on and on, but it's fascinating how much of our memories of certain "golden eras" are simply half remembered truths like this.
After playing some real-life tables recently, I was reminded that even pinball had these settings, which are even less noticeable when changed. Go into the operator settings of a standard Williams Pinball table, and there are five different difficulty settings alongside a standard recommended playtime of two minutes.
That's why the ball-saver feature immediately after launching a ball sometimes disappears before the ball even reaches the bottom of the table. It's not that the ball was caught up in the bumpers and was slow to roll down or whatever, it's because the table deduced, "Yeah, your last ball went over the average time, so on this ball, I'll turn it off when the ball gets close so the ball might immediately drain."
It works in reverse, too - completely suck on your first two balls (now that's a sentence), and you'll find your third ball lasts much longer or suddenly starts activating a multiball mode that doesn't give you a game over until the two minutes are reached.
