Believe it or not, games regularly did get updated even back in the NES era. There's many games out there that had a long enough shelf life to get a PRG1/CHR1 r

Believe it or not, games regularly did get updated even back in the NES era. There's many games out there that had a long enough shelf life to get a PRG1/CHR1 revision and reprint. Furthermore, almost no games were sim-ship[0] back then, so even if games didn't get a re-release in the same territory you still had the opportunity to patch a game for the next country's release. e.g. US v1.0 might be equivalent to JP v1.2 even if Japan never got that version. This is also why a lot of Europeans get really confused at old AVGN videos: some of the games he trashes were dramatically improved for Europe and only sucked in the US. (e.g. Fester's Quest) Furthermore, developers back then were very much not "more careful"; in fact, there's plenty of examples of games that were shipped back then with little or no playtesting or QA work done. And likewise, being able to patch a game later doesn't really fix the reputational harm from shipping broken software. If the game is not playable day-one[1], nobody will care when it's playable on day 255. [0] Industry jargon for SIMultaneous SHIP - as in, release in all territories [1] Day-one patch inclusive. I know people hate them, but they let developers eke out an extra month of QA and bug-fixing time because of how cert works.