Screen Rant has published a rundown of five Nintendo Entertainment System titles that were, by any honest measure, close to impossible for children to finish.

Many of them are now available through the Nintendo Classics NES library on Switch Online, which means a new wave of adults are rediscovering exactly why they never saw the credits roll.

The list is less a curiosity than a documentation: these games were hard by design, and the difficulty was not something childhood memory invented.

Retro Difficulty and the Adult Leisure Calculus

The Switch Online access point is what makes this list more than a nostalgia exercise. These titles are returnable to now, on a modern console, which raises a practical question that would not have occurred to any eight-year-old. Grown adults have finite leisure hours, and how they divide them has become its own kind of calculation.

Mia Kovač, a digital-entertainment analyst who follows Croatia’s online leisure market for the Rizik HR editorial team, recognizes the pattern. She notes that adults who might otherwise spend an evening with a controller increasingly find their options multiplying. Croatian gamblers represent one such segment, directing that same scarce downtime toward online casino and betting platforms rather than returning to a childhood cartridge.

“These NES titles demand a level of patience that modern games rarely ask for — and when adults revisit them through Switch Online, they’re making a genuine choice to spend limited free time somewhere genuinely difficult.”

That choice, Kovač observes, is the point. Replaying a punishing 8-bit platformer is an active decision in a crowded entertainment market, not a default.

Batman and Contra Set the Standard for Brutality

At the top of Screen Rant’s difficulty ranking sit Batman (1989) and Contra, two titles that punished players in fundamentally different ways.

Batman demands mastery of a specific wall-jumping maneuver, requiring players to rebound between narrow walls to climb vertical shafts. The mechanic is unintuitive, and later stages require increasingly precise execution. Screen Rant’s author describes it as one of the most challenging platformers ever released on the NES. There is no margin for sloppiness, and the game offers none.

Contra operates on a different cruelty. Every enemy contact is a one-hit death, and the game’s endgame levels, including the Snow Field and Alien’s Lair, were areas the Screen Rant author had never seen before discovering the Konami Code. That cheat grants 30 lives and, by the author’s account, is essentially required to reach and survive those later stages.

“Once you discovered the Konami Code, there was no turning back, and it quickly made you realize there was no chance you’d beat the game without the cheat enabled.”

A game that requires a cheat code simply to witness its own final levels is not a game designed for completion. It is designed to resist.

The TMNT Dam Level and Everything That Followed

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles was one of the first games released on the NES, and it announced its intentions early. The game’s second main area contains what may be the most infamous single section on the entire list.

Players must swim through tight corridors packed with electrified seaweed while racing against a countdown timer to disarm a series of bombs. The swimming controls are awkward by design, and the seaweed placement leaves minimal room for error. Children who finally cleared it felt they had accomplished something extraordinary. They had.

What waited beyond the dam was not a reprieve. Donatello’s staff made him the most effective turtle in the game, and losing him during the gauntlet that followed carried real strategic cost. Subsequent levels introduced relentless enemies, confusing navigation, and platforming sequences that offered no obvious footholds. Eventually players reached the Technodrome, the game’s culminating fortress, assuming they survived long enough to find it.

“The dam may be the section everyone remembers, but actually finishing Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles required surviving an entire game’s worth of reasons to throw the controller across the room.”

The dam earned its reputation. The rest of the game earned it quietly, level by level.

Paperboy and Super Mario Bros. 2 Round Out the List

Paperboy arrived on the NES after its origins as an Atari arcade game, and it brought a mechanical complexity that young players routinely underestimated. Completing it requires finishing a full week of deliveries, from Monday through Sunday, with difficulty escalating each day.

Players must time newspaper throws at neighbors’ doorsteps while simultaneously avoiding cars, dogs, RC cars, and tornadoes. The coordination demanded is genuinely high, and the progression from Monday’s relative calm to Sunday’s obstacle density is steep.

Super Mario Bros. 2 presents a different kind of challenge. Its vertical-screen mechanics, limited lives, and enemies such as Phanto create sustained pressure. Boss encounters with Birdo and Mouser require non-obvious defeat methods that no child could reasonably intuit on a first attempt.

Princess Toadstool is, in practice, the most effective character in the game. Her floating dress allows players to clear nearly every major encounter and challenging map section more cleanly than any other available character.

Even knowing that, World 7-2 delivers a difficulty spike that the Screen Rant author, an experienced gamer in their late 30s, still struggles to clear while playing through the Switch 2 Classics catalog. That detail matters. It is not nostalgia inflating the memory of a hard game.

World 7-2 is hard now, on modern hardware, with adult reflexes and decades of gaming experience behind the player. The NES library, accessible again through Switch Online, does not soften what it preserves.

Retro Gaming Challenges

The resurgence of NES titles through platforms like Switch Online invites both nostalgia and a fresh appreciation for the challenges that defined a generation of gaming. Adults returning to these notoriously difficult games confront not just their own gaming skills, but the broader context of time, patience, and leisure in today’s fast-paced world.

As these players delve into the punishing landscapes of games like Batman, Contra, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, they experience an active choice to embrace challenge and frustration for the sake of authentic gaming. This connection to the past serves as a reminder that gaming, at its best, can be both a demanding pursuit and a rewarding triumph, making every victory—no matter how small—feel like an extraordinary accomplishment.