There were easy games back in the day. The Super Mario series was a cake walk, so were the Kirby games, Silkworm, Gradius, Life force, Legend of Zelda and so on.
There are easy games now. Some of the games I like, Boy and His Blob, New Super Mario Bros, Other M, Boom Blox, Tekken, Street Fighter IV, Tatsunoku Vs Capcom, Mega Man 9,Resident Evil 4 and 5, BlazBlue, even God of War, are not difficult games. I have a medium skill in video games and I find the games above easy.
A lot of games allow you to choose the difficulty settings of the games, but even that did not help with some games. Alpha Protocol was a snap on Hard mode, so was Batman: Arkham Asylum, Wet, and Dante's Inferno.
There are hard games back then, with Battletoads being the top example. I could not beat that game back then. Years later, I played the Japanese version of the game (emulator) and it was quite beatable.
I was not able to beat the modern Shinobi, F-Zero GX, the original release of Devil may Cry 3, and a lot of other games. I was able to beat some supposedly difficult games like Persona 3, Zombie Apocalypse, Devil Summoner, Digital Devil Saga, and Demon's Souls.
Also, there are some games today that I will never play because they are difficult. You will never get me to play I Wanna Be The Guy, for example.