I think some of that bad game design was economically driven or at least economically influenced.
Firstly, if you judge the "value" of a game based on how long it takes to complete then having overly-complex/fiddly/obscure puzzles is a great way to artificially inflate the perceived "value" of your game via the reported play time in reviews and among players.
Secondly, in the golden age of software piracy, including puzzles that most players wouldn't be able to solve without help creates a way to extract money from otherwise non-paying players via purchases of hint guides or calls to premium-rate hint lines. A kind of precursor to "pay-to-win" microtransactions in modern "free-to-play" games.
Of course, over time both of those influences waned. With the rise of the Internet you could get a walkthrough for any game very easily, killing the market for hint guides/hint lines, and people came to understand that there's more to the value of a game than how long it takes to play (though some "hard-core gamer" types still don't understand this).
I read an interview a while ago with the founder of Wadjet Eye Games (a modern-day retro-aesthetic adventure game studio), Dave Gilbert (no relation to Ron Gilbert of Lucas Arts fame). He said that designing adventure game puzzles these days is very challenging because he is aware that if they are made too hard players will stop playing and just go look up a guide or watch a recorded playthrough, however if they are too easy the player will breeze through the game. Essentially he has to find the right balance of puzzle difficulty to maintain good pacing in his games.
Firstly, if you judge the "value" of a game based on how long it takes to complete then having overly-complex/fiddly/obscure puzzles is a great way to artificially inflate the perceived "value" of your game via the reported play time in reviews and among players.
Secondly, in the golden age of software piracy, including puzzles that most players wouldn't be able to solve without help creates a way to extract money from otherwise non-paying players via purchases of hint guides or calls to premium-rate hint lines. A kind of precursor to "pay-to-win" microtransactions in modern "free-to-play" games.
Of course, over time both of those influences waned. With the rise of the Internet you could get a walkthrough for any game very easily, killing the market for hint guides/hint lines, and people came to understand that there's more to the value of a game than how long it takes to play (though some "hard-core gamer" types still don't understand this).
I read an interview a while ago with the founder of Wadjet Eye Games (a modern-day retro-aesthetic adventure game studio), Dave Gilbert (no relation to Ron Gilbert of Lucas Arts fame). He said that designing adventure game puzzles these days is very challenging because he is aware that if they are made too hard players will stop playing and just go look up a guide or watch a recorded playthrough, however if they are too easy the player will breeze through the game. Essentially he has to find the right balance of puzzle difficulty to maintain good pacing in his games.