In the primordial days before your mom was on the internet, we grew up in fear of the other. In the ’80s and ’90s, we frequently spoke of the mist-shrouded land across the ocean that controlled most of the games we played. Whether we discussed the games that they so selfishly hoarded to themselves, permanently encrypted with their exotic language, or coveted the cutting-edge consoles they got months before we did, they were a mystery to us. Yet, if there’s one thing we feared most about the other, it was their mad skills.
I remember a period in my life when I was convinced that I lived in the softest region in the world. Final Fantasy: Mystic Quest, for example, was said to be created by Square in the belief that Americans were too stupid to fully understand a true RPG, and the Euro Extreme difficulty was inserted into Metal Gear Solid 2 because vanilla Extreme just wasn’t extreme enough for Europeans with their muscular thumbs. Neither statement is accurate, but I’ve heard them repeated more than once. It’s a rather bizarre mindset to have; that video game skill has anything to do with heritage, but this opinion seems so pervasive.
In the ’80s and ’90s, the belief was in some way perpetuated by what has become a rare practice: publishers and developers would often ratchet up or tone down a game’s difficulty when releasing in a new market. However, regardless of the self-deprecating belief that games had to be dumbed down for our under-developed thumbs, there was actually no consistency to which way the changes went. Japanese games that have been localized to North America have varied between being more difficult or much easier, and the same has happened in reverse.
I’m not saying publishers have had difficulty committing to a particular brand of prejudice. After all, our corporate overlords prefer to avoid viewing people as individuals and find it more efficient to just boil down entire countries of people into numbers and statistics. So that’s… better?
The actual reasons for why these changes were made probably doesn’t have anything to do with demographics, but rather a different approach to maximizing sales. I’ll get to that, but first, to demonstrate my point, let’s take a look at some of the more notable instances:
Source: Destructoid A look at the early days of regional difficulty changes