Ignoring the lack of updates if the game is buggy, games back then were also more focused on quality and make gamers replay the game with unlockable features based on skills, not money. I can't count the number of times I played Metal Gear Solid games over and over to unlock new features playing the hardest difficulty and with handicap features, and also to find Easter eggs. Speaking of Easter eggs, you'd lose a number of hours exploring every nook and cranny finding them!
But it did mean they would ship them broken with no chance of fixing them, tbf.
That only happened extremely rarely. Nowadays it seems to be almost mandatory, precisely because the mindset is that they can just fix it later
That happened like, 6 times.
I can literally only think of a handful of games that had serious bugs.
There was that ninja turtles game for nes with the impossible jump, there was enter the matrix for PS2/xbox that was completely not done. There were a few games that were poorly conceived in the first place like ET for Atari...
But yeah, what else had serious bugs?
There isn't a single game without bugs
WrestleMania 2000 on N64 had a bug that would randomly delete all saved data.
There was plenty of terrible, buggy games you just didn't see because stores would drop them. PC had it far worse than console did back in the day. I think it's also that games are just way fucking cheaper now, adjusted for inflation a SNES game was around 120 bucks and a PS2 game was around 75 bucks.
I just don't see how games that don't meet QA requirements and subsequently aren't shelved are in any way comparable to every game on the market today...
I mean I never had to encounter those bugs, games that weren't shelved didn't exist in any meaningful way because nobody spent money on them. But ~~nearly every~~ probably half of the games I buy and play today have serious bugs on day 1 (and many still have them on day 300). That feels like a different paradigm to me.
Still happens, used to be rare