I think it's because in the 80s and 90s we were just better gamers. Repetition, memorization, pattern recognition and tons of practice on nothing but hard games, by todays standards. The mainstream explosion of gaming in the early 2000s has progressively dumbed down the standards of difficulty in games. It's like how cellphones have taken away our ability to remember phone numbers using our minds. We've lost a skillset in game playing, and I think it's because adults started getting into games, starting with the Playstation but mainly in the X-Box era. As gamers got lazier, programmers catered to them, which meant gamers got even more lazy, so then programmers had to lower their standards again, and this just goes in an endless cycle. It was a big deal when you beat a game back in the day, now it's a big deal if you own a game but haven't beaten it.

The Super Star Wars games were known to be really challenging back in the day though. But they were so good you wanted to keep playing so you learned how to master the game.