alessandro800 gamers tried to beat an '80s adventure without a walkthrough—only 2 did - Only .25% of players completed the AGAT, the Adventure Game Aptitude Test, designed by fiendish developer Woe Industries.
ArmchairAce1944A very common thing even back then. Finishing a game was not a given. It was an achievement.
I read something years ago that those games were designed to have illogical puzzles so that you’d pay to call the help line (yes, there was a phone number you’d call for help) or sell paper game guides
Nintendo had a Hotline… I called them once because I got stuck in donkey kong country. (The guy was like ‘at the first ledge just drop straight, there’s a hidden cannon that lets you skip the level’)
That’s frustrating. How were you meant to find that?
The Secret of Monkey Island 2 famously mocked this where you could simulate literally call the helpline in-game as the PC while lost in a jungle.
I need to play this again!
‘Maniac Mansion’, depicted in the thumbnail, specifically has pathways for characters to die or the player to be stuck without a recourse — which later adventures avoided, allowing successful completion from any point in the game.
I recently tried playing through it for the first time (on an Android tablet with ScummVM), and pretty sure I hit such a dead end.