You Can't Do It! 10 Video Games You Could Not Beat as a Kid (no Matter How Hard You Tried)

There was something great about retro games. Then again, there was also something awful about them: they were often nearly impossible to beat.

In the '90s games were still coming off the arcade high, when they were designed to be hard so they'd eat up quarters. It wasn't until later that games were designed so that most players would actually be able to see their endings.

Of course, you could argue that that slippery slope led to the hand-holding cake walks of modern games, but it's inevitable that for every action there's a reaction. The point is games used to be hard as shit.

There are plenty of challenging retro games, and you could spend the rest of your life trying to beat some of them. But these ten stick out because we loved them back in the day—even though we couldn't see them through to the end no matter how hard we tried.

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Sonic games have always been at least a little challenging, but a surprising lack of balance in the Game Gear version of Sonic 2 tipped it over the edge into maddening. It was so difficult that many players, including yours truly, could hardly get past even the first boss.

Damn those deadly bouncing balls!

The Lion King was a brutal platformer in an age filled to the brim with brutal platformers. But kids who just wanted to muck about as Simba for a while found a frustrating and yet strangely compelling game that was hard to put down and even harder to actually beat.

While we're add it let's add that Aladdin game into this category too.

Year: 1991

Super Castlevania IV was one of the first games we ever purchased on the Wii's Virtual Console, and it took about five minutes for us to remember why we never beat it as a kid.

Castlevania games were always challenging back then, but the relative ease of the recent games in the series had our guards down. Make no mistake: Super Castlevania IV is all old school challenge.

What you have to remember about Turtles in Time is that it was an arcade game through and through. That meant it was designed to eat up quarters while you died over and over, even after being ported to the Super Nintendo.

You'd think being able to plug in another controller and play with a partner would have made it easier, but remember also that the arcade version was designed with four players in mind. So yeah, it was not easy.

Comix Zone's awesome aesthetic, with the levels designed to look like the frames of a comic book, always kept us coming back. But beating it was a gargantuan task thanks to its extreme difficulty.

Masters of the game can beat it in almost no time at all, but the uninitiated will fail time and time again. And contrary to what we may have thought back then, reading as many comic books as possible didn't actually make us better at the game.

Mike Tyson's Punch-Out started out with an easy fight against the notorious pussy Glass Joe, but by the time you got to Tyson himself—a difficult task in and of itself—chances were you weren't going to get any further.

Fun fact: the real Mike Tyson could barely even get past Glass Joe, if that makes you feel any better.

Capcom may have changed the title of Super Ghouls 'n Ghosts to distinguish it from its predecessor, Ghosts 'n Goblins, but one thing that remained intact from that game was the crushing difficulty.

Even on the easiest difficulty setting Super Ghouls will chew you up and spit you out.

The Ninja Gaiden series is notoriously difficult, and that goes all the way back to the original game. Like many of the other titles on this list, it's definitely a classic, but trying to actually get to the end was simply a nightmare.

Who'd have thought being a ninja was so difficult?

The Lost Levels is definitely a special case. It was first seen in the U.S. as part of the Super Mario All-Stars bundle game, which also included other classic Mario titles. But in reality what was called "The Lost Levels" here was actually Japan's Super Mario Bros. 2.

The short version of the story is that Nintendo thought (rightly) that the game was too difficult for Western audiences and decided not to release it here, instead giving us a totally different game as Super Mario Bros. 2. That's the one you probably know and love (you know, with the pulling up turnips and such), whereas The Lost Levels is retro platforming hell.

If you grew up during the '90s, as many of our readers no doubt did, then the original The Legend of Zelda was probably not your first Zelda. Yours was probably Ocarina of Time or A Link to the Past, or maybe even one of the Game Boy games, like Link's Awakening.

So if you started with those and ever went back and tried to play the original, you'll know that it was an incredibly difficult game. We still can't beat it today, much less when we were kids—and that's with the infinite resources of the internet at our disposal, too. One day! One day.