Lots of other games would have you automatically grab the ladder. Understandable that the first time was a mistake. At least the mistake wasn't repeated.
Old games were tough, and sometimes unfairly so I'd say. Basically they had to be to create replayability. In the 8bit era, a game would last 30 minutes end to end. The only reason you got hours and hours of gameplay from it was learning the minutia of the timing and pixel positioning. There are many 8 bit games on Spectrum that I never completed. However, on console (Master System) they were all completed, including R-Type twice through where the second time through was 'bullet storm' mode, and the machine couldn't handle drawing all the sprites so it flickered like Betsy! I'd say the console games were fairer. The computer games were thrown together by guys with no knowledge of decent...'game design' because it didn't even exist as a discipline back then! And as devs, without testers, they'd suffer the balancing problem of tuning the game for their many, many playthroughs not appreciating how a noob would take to the game.
I notice in that video that what the players haven't mastered is the timing, the pauses and synchronisation. That's something I think is missing in modern games that are all action based. FIFA, COD, and everything on mobile is constant motion and simple decision making. It's obviously a genre-specific quality to games. And the genres that have strong timing and spacing control requirements are few and far between.
As a final point, this is presumably a random selection of kids, who may not be particularly gamers. So comparisons with the 'yoof of today' would be erroneous. Take the same game and hand it to a random proportion of people in 1987 and plenty would make the same mistakes and fail to understand the game. Also, give the game to many adults now who were around in 1987 and they'd have the same issues if they didn't learn gaming back then. I think some are taking their learnt skills for granted, forgetting that they too started as noobs. Mega Man and games of its ilk are similar to playing tennis against a strong opponent. If you've never played tennis, you can't be expected to do well. So why expect people to play computer games well the first time around? They haven't learnt the skill-set nor the mindset.
