8 Video Game Levels That Destroyed Your Childhood

The rose tinted glasses were smashed by these horrifyingly difficult levels.

Crash bandicoot high road ps1
Naughty Dog

It's a safe assumption that if you're reading this, video games mean something to you.

Whether you're on the side of video games as an art form, or just love bursting heads like grapes in twitchy first-person shooters, it doesn't matter as long as we feel connected to them in some form or another.

In fact, it's probably not much of a stretch to say that video games in our formative years especially, made our childhoods, and we can all look back with rose-tinted glasses of the first time we played Mario 64, or Sonic, or even that loveable rogue Voodoo Vince (I'm kidding he sucked).

That being said, some video games out there weren't interested in making our childhoods but breaking them instead, and these cheeky whippets even did so under the guise of being games made for kids but possessing brutally difficult moments that even our adult selves would struggle to beat.

So let's take a barefoot walk down a memory lane made of broken glass, as things are about to get dark.

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Article adapted from WhatCulture Gaming's Youtube channel - watch here!

8. The Lion King - Can't Wait To Be King

Crash bandicoot high road ps1
Virgin Interactive

While other areas of Lion King franchise made our childhoods, this !*$% game absolutely broke them. In a move that would go on to make children (and adults) around the world cry, Disney approached Virgin Interactive with just one goal.

"Make this game hard enough that kids can't complete it in a single rental period thereby meaning we'll make more money when they have to either buy the game outright or rent it again"

So Virgin Interactive, clearly being children haters, took this message to heart and made The Lion King one of the hardest video games ever to be marketed to kids. The opening level was bad enough as younger players found that Simba was next to useless and had the constitution of an iron lung patient landings to dispatch, but it was the second level "Can't Wait To Be King" that took the cake (and the absolute piss)

Here you needed to use pixel-perfect aim to grab hippo tails, and have almost precognitive powers to understand WHAT THE EVER LOVING f**k THESE MONKEYS WANTED YOU TO DO.

As a kid I remember passing the controller to my dad to get him to help me, only to watch him die over and over on screen and a little more inside each and every time. This game broke my dad.

'Nuff said.

Contributor
Contributor

Jules Gill hasn't written a bio just yet, but if they had... it would appear here.