RetroGaming

From my western perspective, home video game systems like the NES were mostly viewed as expensive kids toys in the 80s and early 90s. Not that adults didn't play them, but that was not the norm so to speak like it is today.

Most of the game libraries of these systems were very clearly made to appeal to kids, and yet it was very common for them to be much harder than they had any business being considering that target audience. For every "hard but fair" game I played, it seemed like there were 5 others that were just hard for the sake of being hard with terrible controls and cheap gimmicks to make it more difficult.

From what I recall, some developers/publishers were making games intentionally very hard as a hedge against the rental industry, and looking back, that seems to track.

As for the original Super Mario Bros 2, which IIRC was known as The Lost Levels when released here -- By the time it came out, it seemed lame and dated to us kids. I couldn't even tell you if it was hard because it was boring (by kid standards). It looked just like the old, tired "original" Super Mario Bros and right from the start it didn't appear to offer anything new, improved, or different like the Super Mario 2 & 3 games as well as Super Mario World gave us.