Games back then had bugs, too, they just never got fixed and everyone pretended they didn't exist.

And if they didn't just work, they never got fixed.

I hate AI and all that shit, but I have heard a lot of horror stories from developers who worked on "retro" gaming systems (from the Megadrive/Genesis to the Jaguar). I admire them for all the work they did because it was hard to code, but there are a fuckton of bugs that were sold during the good old days, and no one noticed what was happening because those bugs were never found.

There were lots of games that had multiple release revisions that fixed bugs. Gran Turismo 2's original versions couldn't be completed 100% due to a glitch, a reprint ended up fixing it. If you bought the game on launch, you were stuck with that copy.

This is also why if you go looking for ROMs, you'll see some games have multiple versions with some differences.

There were also lots of games that were released in buggy, unfinished states. They just don't get remembered but anyone who grew up gaming in the 90s and early 2000s probably remembers getting some garbage bargain bin games from relatives at Christmas that were complete disasters. The Fifth Element game, for example.

Until you got to the sky canyon in twilight princess and the glitch made you start over because there was no way to patch offline games

Not only that, but developers back then had to be really deliberate with their decisions due to the tiny size on the media and ram.

Games used to be much more simple too, and easier to test and fix.