"We would sit at lunch - and this went on for years - and say, 'Here's the problem we have: the magazine reviewers, who had so much influence on gamers, are very expert players, and they want very challenging games. Our own teams are expert players who want to make challenging games. The people in retail want very challenging games. And the first 100,000 people who will buy a game on a console want very challenging games.' So when the people who control your economic success, and your first customers, all want very challenging games, you'd better give them those games.
"But there was a problem. You'd sell your first 100,000 copies to those faithful players, yes, but as the Nineties went on, 100,000 copies was not enough to keep your job... If you made the game challenging enough to please the first 100,000 people, it meant you couldn't get to 1 million." But if you made a game too accessible, it wouldn't get enough support from the (at that time) all-powerful games media to sway the die-hard fans. "It felt like a trap," Daglow said, one that motivated publishers to start experimenting more than ever with partitioning games into difficulty levels.
