I would estimate that I spent between eight and nine hours mapping LJN's broken, notionally interactive desert. My time there brought me straight back to an era where expecting fairness or even basic functionality from your interactive entertainment was, at best, an unsafe bet. My 2015 brain, by contrast, has grown accustomed to software doing more or less what I expect it to. Physics engines, difficulty curves, and level design have been refined beyond what I can possibly imagine, and I've been rewired to take it all for granted. Returning to it a quarter-century after the fact, LJN's catalog elicited a uniquely modern kind of cognitive dissonance; it felt like interactivity seasickness.

Now that the sickness has subsided, it would be elegant for me to be able to say technology and consumer demand have moved past the LJN era, but this is America, and stuff will always be getting rushed out the door to capitalize on other stuff. It's also arguable that game publishers' cynicism has adapted to become more endemic, complicated, and culturally destructive than it ever was. The form and function of video games have kept moving, however, and the way naked cash grabs invariably miss their marks and immediately freeze in time ends up turning them into cultural artifacts. Super Mario Brothers is timeless and is about as fun today as it was when it came out. The only positive thing I can say about The Incredible Crash Dummies is that it's a preserved-in-amber snapshot of the vacuous junk people were expected to tolerate in 1993. In that way, and because we no longer have to play them, LJN's horrible games manage to be much more useful now than they were at the time.