I think there is truth to what you said but you also have to be careful not to judge 1980s games by 2020s standards.
All the games were user hostile back then. You could play a sierra game with hostile user input parsing and really nice graphics for the day. Or you could play another game that was even more hostile but had no graphics or vastly worse graphics, and often with next to no story. Often you had to be a huge nerd to even get the games to run at all. You probably needed to learn a lot about DOS config or how to write .bat files to get sound to work or your graphics to work right. A typical non-nerd consumer would probably never have figured out how to get it to run unless maybe Tech Support was excellent back then. My Dad was an engineer.. no way we'd have ever gotten them to run without his knowledge.
A lot of the negative stuff happened at the very end before they were acquired and then after they were acquired. But even in the early 1990s they had some mega hits.. they just weren't in the original lineup of adventure games. IMO the adventure games never really worked once they started using the mouse. They were less hostile but just seemed dumb. In the early 1990s the Dynamix games Sierra published were great though, those were/are some of my most favorite games from my childhood. What was hostile about those was getting them functioning in Dos though. I remember Metal Tech Earthsiege being a real huge effort with config.sys and autoexec.bat to get the whole game to function.
I wanted to play a lot of these games bad enough to learn more about the computer worked, the hostility probably contributed to me going down the path of studying CS.
I think the point about hostility was not necessarily the operating environment as much as the game dynamics, which were based on frustration and repeating an action many, many times until stumbling on the solution.
All the games were user hostile back then. You could play a sierra game with hostile user input parsing and really nice graphics for the day. Or you could play another game that was even more hostile but had no graphics or vastly worse graphics, and often with next to no story. Often you had to be a huge nerd to even get the games to run at all. You probably needed to learn a lot about DOS config or how to write .bat files to get sound to work or your graphics to work right. A typical non-nerd consumer would probably never have figured out how to get it to run unless maybe Tech Support was excellent back then. My Dad was an engineer.. no way we'd have ever gotten them to run without his knowledge.
A lot of the negative stuff happened at the very end before they were acquired and then after they were acquired. But even in the early 1990s they had some mega hits.. they just weren't in the original lineup of adventure games. IMO the adventure games never really worked once they started using the mouse. They were less hostile but just seemed dumb. In the early 1990s the Dynamix games Sierra published were great though, those were/are some of my most favorite games from my childhood. What was hostile about those was getting them functioning in Dos though. I remember Metal Tech Earthsiege being a real huge effort with config.sys and autoexec.bat to get the whole game to function.
I wanted to play a lot of these games bad enough to learn more about the computer worked, the hostility probably contributed to me going down the path of studying CS.