I was in my mid 30s when I found out that you could hold some button when continuing after game over in Super Mario Bros to continue in the world you died.
We just got gud and abused the turtle shell stair 1up.
Look at it this way. Didn’t you have more fun losing over and over, never completing the game and being stained permanently with that empty feeling of defeat?
I watched a video recently about tool assisted Speedruns which actually educated me on why this worked. An issue with the sound card and the way user input was handled allowed certain button combinations to cause Random Code Execution. It's actually possible to beat one of the Mario games (can't remember the name right this second) on the first frame using this method, but it requires a ridiculous amount of inputs
Right. But the GUI the user is served has only one possible action, which is leaving that screen. The rest of the buttons were set up to do nothing. "Press any button" style screens make a lot more sense. Although I'd rather be sent to an actual menu immediately when opening a program.
I get what you're saying and I'm not disagreeing. I'm just trying to view it through a lens of a generation that doesn't have the accumulated life experiences of operating such screens.