The truth is most arcade games were designed to fuck your shit up as quickly as possible and make you funnel in more quarters.
When you consider something like the insane difficulty of the original Donkey Kong, which is crushingly hard from the very outset, you realize how often these games were designed to kill you off within literal seconds or a minute tops.
At least with SFII, there were ways to cheese the game. MK on the other hand was like dolling out money to be battered; I still get the shakes thinking about the CPU from MK3.
When you consider something like the insane difficulty of the original Donkey Kong, which is crushingly hard from the very outset, you realize how often these games were designed to kill you off within literal seconds or a minute tops.
At least with SFII, there were ways to cheese the game. MK on the other hand was like dolling out money to be battered; I still get the shakes thinking about the CPU from MK3.