"Retro gamers" should be able to beat these games

[qw90700]

because of popularity, retro difficulty in the current mindset is associated mainly with NES games, but if you put the NES on a difficulty tier list, it would be actually somewhere in the middle.

Top difficulty systems in the 80s-90s would be actually the arcade coin eaters with the arcade controls meant for adult hands and afterwards the various computer systems were many games shipped without any serious quality control, plus you had to figure out the technical aspects of the game.
Back then I considered players who finished those arcade and computer games much more skilled than myself who beat a bunch of NES games. Because I had tried those games too and found them ultra difficult.

Whereas nowadays everything is streamlined across both consoles and computers as it is impossible to master everything.

But back then, even if you mastered few NES games, you were a small fry in the gaming world

IMO NES games can have their own "hard" gameplay for many reasons but the hardest games I ever played are on Sega Genesis. I can name a few to give you idea:

Back to the Future Part 3

The Immortal

The Pagemaster

Doom Troopers

Chakan: The Forever Man

NES games are actually child friendly therefore once you learn the ropes you can even beat Silver Surfer just fine. Silver Surfer is just "harder MegaMan" in design philosophy but adds stupid "touch walls and die" shit. But when it comes to Sega Genesis games shit goes beyond learning patterns, it goes beyond skill and luck is involved at that point. The games gets into the realm of "dying simulators". As a result even when Arcade games could be unfair but once you learn the patterns you would waste less coins and you would end up finishing the whole game (if it even has an end) with single coin. But Sega Genesis tried to differentiate itself from Nintendo so their target audiance was older teens and adults and that's why they increased the difficulty into a nonsense level lol.