Try to finnish Mega Man or Super Mario 3 (without using the cheat pipes). I mean ... did any child actually manage to do it?
As an adult I managed to finnish Sonic 2 after trying like 4 times. I could only pass one level in Mega Man.
The difficulty level were really hard core. And no easy mode either.
Of course we did. We also didn't have hundreds of games to play at the same time.
This is why rts games from my perspective will not return as we used to know them, they relied on that captive audience side of things, which faded away during the early 00's
Now that I think about it, at that point, I’d played countless hours of games on the Fairchild Channel F, Atari 2600 and C64, how were my reflexes back then?
Now I get bored of games after a few hours :(