10 Opening Bosses That Totally Ruined Video Games

4. Brock - Pokemon Red & Blue

Yeah not for me this one, but a number of dear friends in school jumped immediately off the magical Pokémon hype train of 1999 when confronted with Brock. Despite flexing their muscles in Viridian Forest by - and let me just check my notes here - wailing on tiny insects and their cocoons, precisely 1/3rd of players were comically unprepared to face Brock.

You see, if you'd picked either Squirtle or Bulbasaur at the start of the game, you were able to dunk on your first gym leader in a matter of minutes. Both water and grass able to knock rock types out in short order. However, for those of us who (correctly) chose Charmander at the beginning of the game, the deck was stacked in the opposite direction.

Even the other Pokémon you might have added to your party in that time were useless. Ratatta's normal attacks did minimal damage, Pidgey's flying did even less, Pikachu's electricity had no effect at all, and both Caterpie and Weedle were weak beyond belief; none of them could land a glove on Onix or Geodude. If you were a genius like me then you knew it was a matter of getting a Butterfree to learn Confusion but for 90% of more casual players, the difficulty curve was an immediate put-off.

Cowards.