When I was a kid games were very expensive (for me), and procuring them was difficult and time consuming.
You had to beg your mom to drive you to the mall, and if you were successful, you then might spend an hour browsing titles at the store. You had to carefully scrutinize the screenshots and description on the back of the box to know what you were getting, because the cover was often misleading. You did your best guesswork based on what you heard at school and what your friends were playing, but ultimately it was a gamble. More than once, you might do all of this to end up buying a stinker. So the stakes were very high as a kid.
On the trip back home from the mall, you would pour over the manual and LARP in your imagination. Getting home was like Christmas morning, a mad rush to the PC to turn it on and wait for it to boot up. The installation process was some kind of black magic; putting the disk in the drive and typing out a strange combination of letters, characters, and spaces. More often than not screwing it up. If you didn't screw it up, the disk drive would make angry noises, and you would sit there with a worried expression on your face, hoping the computer wouldn't explode. Then, it would prompt you to add another disk, and another, and another. The process was tedious and tense and it took forever. You never knew if you might accidentally have a faulty disk, or what if you entered the wrong command and erased one?
Then, miraculously, you would be greeted by an introduction screen and glorious music!
After having committed to all of the above, quitting was out of the question. You would devote days of your life to somehow make that game worth playing even if it killed you. If you were lucky you might end up with a good game 2/3 times. If you didn't, there was no returning an unsealed product. You were married to it.
The stakes were high, and initial boredom was never an option.