This masochistic mentality about how challenging video games should be is new to me. As has been mentioned, there have been cheats as long as there have been difficult games. Who really beat Contra without the code? And considering how many weeks of allowance were sunk into those things, is it really so horrible for a kid to want to see all the levels? All Nintendo is doing is saving kids the trouble of buying Game Genies and typing in the damn codes.

I remember being young (very young, I was born in 1981) and playing Dungeon Master on my dad's Atari ST 1040...according to my parents, I learned how to read so I could play play Planetfall and Hitchhiker's Guide!

The one gripe I have with this article is that it neglects the now mostly-extinct genre of interactive fiction. Sierra and Lucasarts both expanded on the Infocom format and made games that I think were as much role-playing games as all the hack-and-slash dungeon games. Both were only able to capture certain aspects of table-top RPG's, and I liked both but always enjoyed the adventure games more. You don't see too many RPG's today that don't rely and tons of mindless combat to fill up space, and these were long, involved games which had few or no combat sequences for the most part. Most early RPG's were pretty light on the RP....