10 Stupidly Hard Video Games Clearly Made By Sadists

7. Battletoads

This is a rather obvious one, given it is on pretty much all of these lists. Saying that, there's a reason Battletoads is so notorious: it's one of the hardest games of all time. Being on MegaDrive (or Sega Genesis, depending where you're from) it didn't really have that much plot, but from what I can recall you played a toad member of an animal secret service punching her/his way across multiple environments in order to stop some villain.

Of course the story may have been fantastic and I just didn't get to experience it, as I never got past a section in about level three where you're on a skateboard moving forward very quickly and trying to jump over these big rocks. The only issue is you have roughly four lives and there's only about half a second between the rock coming on screen and you hitting it. The hardest part of this is about halfway-through (or at least I assume it was halfway-through, I never got past it to find out) where jumping over a rock seems to unavoidably cause you to land on another, killing you instantly. Then, once your lives inevitable run out, you have to start the game again from the beginning, with none of this fancy checkpointing or saving like in modern games. Battletoads is a ruthless game that will kill you suddenly and mercilessly on a regular basis, laughing as it does so. Completing level one is an achievement in itself and, although I hate how easy games have become in the modern age, I'm sure as Hell glad they don't make 'em like this anymore.