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Well, this challenges a lot of my preconceptions. I'm kind of 50/50 on it. Like, if I take Doom for instance, the original on standard difficulty, with modern ASWD and mouselook controls, is trivially easy. When I was a kid, playing with the default controls that practically had you moving like a tank, I think holding the alt key to strafe, it was borderline impossible. I exclusively played with cheats I found it so punishing at 10 years old.
With the original Warcraft, most of the difficulty IMHO came from the primitive controls. Warcraft II improved on them enough that I didn't find it too severe a challenge with respect to that at least. Starting with Starcraft, despite the group size being limited to 12 units, it's fine IMHO. On recent playthroughs, I did notice that the campaign in Warcraft II seems like more of a challenge, and I found myself actually running out of resources, and not really getting 2nd or 3rd tries if an assault failed. Starcraft by comparison had a campaign that was relatively easier, with more plentiful resources and a less aggressive AI, that seemed willing to let you recover from mistakes until you got it.
But I don't think you can directly compare multiplayer games. How "hard" a competitive game is will always be contingent on the players involved. Likewise, I'm not sure I consider the sort of "difficulty" that hinges on whether you have access to a wiki or not actual difficulty. Looking up what OP strategy works on a boss isn't that much different from the sorts of moon logic puzzles that eventually killed point and click adventure games, and which most gamers rejected as being artificial "difficulty". It's not difficulty, it's just bad design.
That said, there are hard games from back then which still hold up. I find NES and SNES era Mario games just as difficult as I always did. Lately I've been stretching outside of my gaming comfort zone and throwing a credit into the original arcade Gradius from time to time. It felt like a big achievement when I was able to semi-reliably get to level 3.
TV Tropes becomes helpful here.
Old games were full of this stuff.
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NES and SNES era Mario games had something most of their contemporaries lacked. They actually controlled well and had good visual clarity, setting the standards for pretty much all later platformers with the degree of momentum and mid-air control offered. This lets the gameplay itself be the challenge, instead of wresting with controls.
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