The old Atari Impossible Mission was quite literally impossible due to a bug in the program.
Chessmaster is damn difficult for those of us who don’t play chess very well.
Of what I currently play, I vote for Myst 3 Exile as the hardest of the lot. Getting to the three other worlds is fairly easy, what to do when you get there is not.
Could I please get more information on this? I have the swordquest games, but no manuals. There’s an obvious zodiac theme. I can get into most treasure rooms. But, half the time I have no idea what the objects are supposed to be. And, I have NO clue what the goal of the game is
My Nomination-
Weird Dreams
I have read hints, faqs, and cheat files. I STILL cannot get past the homicidal girl with the carnivorous soccer ball. I have heard of ways to get inifinite lives. I can’t get any of them to work.
I beat that guy first try. Seriously. It was freakish. The first two big monsters took a while and quite a few attempts, so when I stepped up to the football stadium I expected a long fight. As it happened I had a fully loaded devastator, and 20 seconds later, the guy was history.
Bump ‘n’ Jump for Intellivision.
Was there any END to that game? (I played both the Intellivision and NES version)
Snake, Rattle, 'n Roll probably had one of the hardest final bosses, not that he was difficult himself, but it took forever to kill. Even using Game Genie to get infinite lives, it still took us an hour and a half to beat that boss alone.
Has anyone here ever played “Alice”? Seriously, that is the hardest game I’ve ever played, but also one of the best. I’ll admit, I used cheat codes to get through a lot of it because without them, I would have been reduced to a shrieking, hysterical, fetal girl on the floor.
My vote is for “Stuntman” on the PS2.
The concept is great - you’re a stuntman, and you drive cars through crazy stunts. It had the potential to be as fun as GTA III without the violence (ok, maybe not, but close).
Instead, you have to finish ALL of the stunts for a movie in ONE TAKE. You’re allowed to miss a stunt slightly here or there, but you can’t get more than a second or so behind where you’re supposed to be in the shot. If you take a turn slightly wide, or spin out on a dirt road, the director yells “cut!” and you have to start over again from the very begining.
The only way I could see anyone finishing this game is if they had the same memory disorder as Sammy Jenkis in “Memento”. You need enough short term memory to remember where to go from your last run, but you can’t remember that you’ve tried this over and over again sixty times before.
Oh, and even though it’s a driving game, it only supports the DualShock II controller. Not even a DualShock I works. Forget about third party steering wheels or controllers like the NeGecon.
Hmmm…I’m not sure! Maybe thats why I never finished it!
I’ve never met anyone who has reached the end of any of the classic Gauntlet games(not the more recent ones).
Huh… E.T. on Atari wasn’t bad at all. (In my fuzzy memories at least.) I usually turned off at least one of the FBI guys with the difficulty switches, but I was able to beat it with both on. You had to fall into the wells to find the 3 pieces of the communicator. Then levitate out of the wells, and get back to the field, and call your friends for pickup.
The problem was that your neck stretch had different powers depending on where you stood on the screen, and the symbols at the top of the screen to tell you what your power was were kinda cryptic.
That and the FBI guys were wicked fast…
My vote is for Raiders on Atari. Especially without instructions. My friend and I played it together to manage to two sticks. We got pretty far, but without knowing what all the funky icons we picked up did, it was impossible to beat.
I’ll say Days of Thunder for NES. Aside from the fact that going around in endless circles was f-ing boring (much like real NASCAR, IMO), you had to race flawlessly to have a shot at winning a single race. You’d race so intently for 10 minutes that the muscles in your hand ache, you finally work your way up to #2 . . . then you take one turn poorly, or you make an error in the pit, and you’re screwed. Useless game cartridge.
Asteroids, man! I could never get past the part with the flying boulders!
I remember getting quite far, but I had to leave because my mom made me. 
The reason we got as far as we did is one of the players was an adult with a sack of quarters and was paying for the other 3 players. I guess he REALLY wanted to see the endgame.
Is that the game where you were an escaped convict and you were running through a mine looking for the bags of gold you hid there? There were guards that you could kill with a pickaxe and to ride in the mine cart you had to jump up and grab a beam (alllup) and then drop into the cart. (Hoopla)
I still go around saying aallllup–hoopla.
No I never passed level one. I think it only had one level.
I think we need to define “freakishly difficult”. I won’t play many games that are just unfair and stupid. I’ve gotten very far in Doom on the hardest level BTW (too bad I don’t have it anymore) but I can’t finish it since it’s totally insane.
“Hard” games in my list include the Atari games ET and Star Wars (faint memory about Star Wars and trying to blast AT AT’s…but then again I was 6 when I was playing so maybe it wasn’t hard but just me). Metroid (sp)? Was pretty hard since it didn’t freakin’ end! You just started over again with no helmet!
One game I remember was “Blaster Master”? for NES. Never finished it but I really liked it for some reason and remember it was hard.
Right now, for me, it’s the last Night Elf mission in Warcraft III. I weep like a little school girl.
The very one. Seems like you were really into it. I’m not sure whether there were different levels; I never even managed to collect all the bags of the first (only?) level, so I wouldn’t know what happens then. Those guards were so quick!
Well, right now Donkey Kong 64 is driving me nuts.
I owned a lot of Commodore 64 games that I always thought were hard, but most of the names are escaping me. Of course, I was 12 or younger (and lazy) so I thought everything was hard.
In more recent memory, I had a demo version of Aliens vs. Predator that came with my sound card. You could play as a marine or Predator. The Predator is cool but it was hard to get back health. With the marine I’d run out of ammo too quickly trying to fight those f****** Aliens.
Nah – you had to use both joysticks with Raiders, but it wasn’t simultaneously. The left stick was for movement and action, and the right stick was for inventory. The only Atari game to use both joysticks simultaneously was the Atari 800 (computer) version of Robotron – the box even had a plastic insert with joystick-base-shaped depressions to hold both sticks for you while you played.
And IIRC, only Earthworld and Fireworld were made in the Swordquest series – Waterworld exists as an incomplete beta, and Airworld was never started. I have a copy of the Swordquest contest “showdown” article on my web site.