Minus the “pay $5 to skip” part, retro games are overwhelmingly more likely to be the second than the first. How do you keep someone playing your game for longer than a weekend, in an age where games are 12mb you can’t add new content after you ship? You make your game hard as balls and require a ton of grinding.

Not all games were like this, but tons were. Final fantasy, Ghosts n Ghouls/Goblins, Battletoads, and more all follow this pattern. Even Pokémon isn’t exactly hard but half of the game is just grinding.