10 Gruelling Video Game Levels That Were Just The Beginning

10. Level 1 - Contra

8-bit games are wild in that their first levels are almost universally more well known than literally anything else about them. The reasons for this slot into one of two categories: one, save files took a while to become a thing, so turning it on meant going back to the beginning across the board.

And two, they were all ball-bustingly hard, making that first level more familiar to the kids who played them than the interiors of their houses as a result. Guess which of those two categories Contra falls into.

The first level of Contra is legendary among Gen-X gamers, giving you one of the most perfect walkthroughs of everything you can expect from this game: fast paced run and gun action, and dying. A lot.

This entry makes for a good representation of every super hard NES game that kicked your butt and then laughed in your face as you processed how little progress you'd actually made in the long run. Sure it doesn't show you a detailed map of the game's levels like later NES games would do, but dying to this first level as many times as you're guaranteed to, only for you to realize how much was left, is pretty brutal on its own.