35 Years Later, This NES Game Is Still Near-Impossible To Beat

Published Sep 13, 2026, 10:00 AM EDT

Tom Wilson is a Gaming Features Writer at Screen Rant. Over the past five years, Tom has worked as the Editor-in-Chief at The Game Crater, as a Staff Writer for GamingIntel, a List Writer at TheGamer, and, of course, as a Senior Writer at ScreenRant. Tom has experience writing reviews, guides, news, and features, and has been responsible for teams of writers, training them and editing their work.

Tom graduated with a Masters in Multimedia Journalism, and has since gone on to build up his portfolio of games journalism work.

It is hard to deny that the NES era wasn't filled with revolutionary titles and genuinely great games. Even for those of us who were born a generation too late, returning to the highly recommended NES titles or even obscure releases that are only just now getting the spotlight they deserve is a worthwhile experience, one that eschews the tropes and failings of modern gaming in favor of a Ubisoft-driven, live-service slop detox that we're all in desperate need of.

For the most part, you can pick any NES title and find yourself whisked away to whimsical universes teeming with a wonderfully stripped-back simplicity. However, you could end up with a dud, a game masked by its infamy, one that clawed its way to the upper echelons of the NES hall of fame in a desperate bid to lure in unsuspecting visitors. One such title, hidden within the very best NES games of all time, is so impossibly difficult that even if you were to play it today, you'd find yourself a broken person by the end of the ordeal.

This NES Game Is So Hard, It Isn't Worth Playing

Through the assimilation of ideas, game development has evolved to ensure that the punishingly challenging difficulties of yesteryear are very much an antiquated concept. No more will players unfairly be subjugated to an endless array of poorly designed levels, broken mechanics, or time-wasting trivial pursuits as a consequence of bad game design. It is refreshing to no longer fear the far-too commonplace pratfalls of game design, and instead, rely entirely on our skill as a player, achieved through years of experience.

However, this was not always the case, as proven by the NES' hardest games, titles that quite literally broke players and, undoubtedly, turned many away from the medium. These games were so unrelentingly difficult, not due to any skill issue on behalf of the player, but as a consequence of both the industry at the time and the method in which developers approached the creation of games back then. Perhaps the greatest example of this is Battletoads, a game that was so infamously difficult, it practically broke the rental industry's chokehold on NES cartridges.

To be clear, Battletoads has always been a great game. Its difficulty, while near-impossible to overcome, only served to obfuscate one's enjoyment of an otherwise exceptional title. Its phenomenal score, great art, and frenetic gameplay were all considered best-in-class at the time, which is perhaps why Rare's decision to eschew traditional game design conventions and amp up the difficulty is so frustrating. Indeed, Battletoads is one of the few NES games that broke players, albeit not for positive reasons, and while the franchise went on to endure a lasting legacy, the now 35-year-old original entry will forever live in infamy.

Battletoads Will Always Go Down In Infamy As One Of The NES' Hardest Games

During the time of Battletoads' development, the rental industry had carved a foothold in the world of video games, siphoning sales from traditional publishers by renting out titles for a fraction of the cost. As the vast majority of titles were easily beatable over the course of a weekend due to the smaller scope of most game development, renting was a logical step for consumers to take, as even longer titles could be beaten over two rental periods, which was still significantly cheaper than paying full price.

In response, the difficulty (and length) of games was vastly increased, which, in turn, facilitated the need to rent them numerous times, which became financially unviable. Battletoads was among the flock of incredibly challenging games of the era, titles that, much like the arcade cabinets before them that were designed to be so punishingly difficult you were forced to shell out dozens of quarters to get through them, had been purposefully crafted to beat the rental industry at its own game. It isn't clear whether Rare designed Battletoads with such a purpose in mind, but it certainly achieved it regardless.

Battletoads ended up selling rather well, in spite of its inaccessible difficulty, and Rare subsequently made several sequels. However, even today, one will likely struggle to beat Battletoads, its razor-sharp margin of error practically ensuring that the slightest mistake sends players back to the start of a level. One only needs to try the game's third level once in order to get a firm idea of exactly why children struggled to beat Battletoads on the NES in the 90s, and why, today, adults continue to throw down the controller in exasperation.