10 Video Games That Kill You In The First 10 Seconds

Many video games are kind to their players, often starting off with simple tutorial sequences or very easy opening levels to hold our hands and introduce us to the game mechanics, giving us a little time to grow accustomed to how the game works rather than just throwing us in at the deep end and hoping for the best.

Other games, especially older titles, don't tend to bother with all of that. These games drop you right into the action and just let you get on with it, throwing fatal traps, bottomless pits and unexpected deaths at the player right from the off. You'll have to think fast and act faster in these games if you want to survive just the first few moments!

There are countless games that let you die within their opening scenes, but here are ten of the most memorable examples. When playing through these titles for the very first time, many players fell victim to their early tricks and traps and saw themselves greeted with a Game Over message way earlier than expected.

The classic 1984 action game Karateka begins with the protagonist standing rather perilously on the edge of a cliff. Of course, most players would have begun by moving to the right and safely continuing to the first enemy, but it was perfectly possible to die very quickly if you dared move to the left even a tiny bit.

The movements of the Karateka protagonist are famously quite slow and deliberate, with each button press resulting in quite a lengthy animation, so it was very easy for players to accidentally fall to their deaths within just a few seconds of starting the game up while testing out the various commands.

For example, if you go into your fighting stance and then come out of it without moving forwards, the character will plummet to his doom. Similarly, if you happen to take a single step back, he'll also die, resulting in one of the fastest Game Over screens in gaming history.