Ignoring the lack of updates if the game is buggy, games back then were also more focused on quality and make gamers replay the game with unlockable features based on skills, not money. I can’t count the number of times I played Metal Gear Solid games over and over to unlock new features playing the hardest difficulty and with handicap features, and also to find Easter eggs. Speaking of Easter eggs, you’d lose a number of hours exploring every nook and cranny finding them!
But it did mean they would ship them broken with no chance of fixing them, tbf.
Still happens, used to be rare
That only happened extremely rarely. Nowadays it seems to be almost mandatory, precisely because the mindset is that they can just fix it later
That happened like, 6 times.
I can literally only think of a handful of games that had serious bugs.
There was that ninja turtles game for nes with the impossible jump, there was enter the matrix for PS2/xbox that was completely not done. There were a few games that were poorly conceived in the first place like ET for Atari…
But yeah, what else had serious bugs?
There isn’t a single game without bugs
WrestleMania 2000 on N64 had a bug that would randomly delete all saved data.