Nintendo Hard/Non Video Game Examples

Game Shows

 * The Nickelodeon kids show Legends of the Hidden Temple had a really low success rate (less than 25%). The locked doors guaranteed that the artifact you need to find was in the LAST room you'd enter, and you had to perform tasks and solve puzzles in up to 12 rooms before you found it (some were simple, like the Throne of the Pretender, but others, like the Shrine of the Silver Monkey, messed EVERYONE up.) Adding to that were Temple Guards, who would "kidnap" you and would cause your teammate to have to start over from the beginning. Throw in darkness, shadows, music, fog, Kirk Fogg, and more than one kid ended up walking in circles with confused looks on their faces.
 * The final round in Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego?? wasn't too bad if you knew about geography, but the final round of Where in Time Is Carmen Sandiego?? was painful. In theory, The Trail of Time wasn't too bad. There were six gates you had to pass through. Carmen asked a history question with two answers (EXAMPLE: It's 1960. The song "We Shall Overcome" is dedicated to which US protest movement? Civil Rights or Anti-War?) Get the answer right, the gate opens; Get it wrong, you have to perform some time-consuming task like pulling up a rock with a rope or spinning a wheel. This wouldn't be too bad, except they didn't put the gates in order. They were generally scattered around, and all the kids had to work with were a few blinking lights and the Engine Crew leading them around with airport flashlights. It was confusing enough to fuel the theory that they made the Trail of Time deliberately confusing so they wouldn't have to pay out the grand prize as often (Since Time was created after World's budget was cut down.)
 * World wasn't much better, the beacons the player had to place needed to be put in exactly the right spot or the sensor wouldn't register. Not only that but they were just slightly top-heavy and had a tendency to fall over and need to be replaced in order to win. Add in the fact that the locations were given in such an order that it usually forced the player to wind through beacons they had already placed (thus accidentally knocking them over and having to spend extra time putting them back up) led to man grand prizes lost.
 * UK show The Crystal Maze was won by only a few teams in its entire run. The individual challenges to earn crystals ranged from dead simple to unfair, but what ultimately decided the difference between winning an adventure holiday or going home with only a souvenir paperweight was the Crystal Dome, a giant hollow wind chamber in the shape of a crystal in which the team would have a period of five seconds per crystal to grab at slips of foil, hoping to collect 100 more gold ones than silver ones.
 * The Japanese sure do love creating sadistic obstacle course shows for the masses to humiliate themselves on:
 * Ninja Warrior is just pure obstacle course hell, with the obstacles becoming more and more difficult with each season. In all of its 23+ seasons of running, only three people have successfully completed all four levels of the competition. In fact, the show's design team have admitted that they try each tournament to make the first round so tough that no one could beat it.
 * The most devastating obstacle of them all, by far, is the Cliffhanger. It's basically a hand-strength obstacle placed in the middle of the 3rd round, where upper-body strength is the means to victory. The first three versions were rather simple, with anyone with enough hand strength able to get through it handily. Then came the 4th version, which included a rise so that most competitors would have to JUMP across the gaps between bars 2 and 3 to proceed, which was bad enough considering most contestants are EXHAUSTED by that point. Then, after the Urushihara beat the course, came the Ultimate Cliffhanger...
 * Possibly even worse is the female version of the tournament, which only one woman has successfully beaten (and she's done it three times!). In the most recent one, four of the original tournament's recurring competitors (dubbed the All-Stars) had each mentored a female competitor. None of their proteges made it past the first stage.
 * Takeshi's Castle is Nintendo Hard in TV game show form. It ran for three years, each episode had 100-142 starting contestants; only nine people ever won (this isn't including the joke episode where everybody won).
 * Unbeatable Banzuke mostly involves either getting through an insanely complicated obstacle course using an unusual method of travel (like walking on one's hands, on stilts, with a wheelbarrow, etc.), completing an oversized children's game, or performing as many exercise feats as possible within a time limit. Out of the hundreds that try their luck, only 2 or 3 on average manage to succeed, with the record before the show's cancellation being 7 wins.
 * Hole In The Wall is another game that's pretty difficult to win, due to the fact that most of the time the holes are way to small for the average contestants to fit through properly and if the hole is destroyed, the contestant loses the round regardless of whether they were pushed off of the course or not. The difficulty was shot Up to Eleven during the final round where the contestant was BLINDFOLDED and had to listen to their teammates instructions in order to get through the hole. Couple this with the fact that some of the later rounds had holes that were airborne in the MIDDLE of the wall, which required the contestant to blindly jump and get lucky enough to clear the hole and you can see why the success rate of the winners is so low.
 * Minute to Win It is a prime example of this trope. The first few levels are usually simple, but once you hit around Level 6, they truly start getting Nintendo Hard (try bouncing six marbles into tiny thimbles, or keeping three marbles on a slanted table with the back of a spoon for a full minute, or using a chopstick in one hand to make a stable tower of ten metal nuts on a wooden board in the other hand). But the real head of the beast is Supercoin, the Million Dollar game. You have to bounce a quarter off of a table into a water jug 15 feet away, with the hole being a mere 1.75 inches wide (barely larger than the quarter itself). Needless to say, it's basically a Luck-Based Mission, and of the eight people who have tried it (only one of whom got there the "legitimate" way, mind you), all have failed.
 * It's getting so bad that now the audience even groans upon hearing the game's name. That's how stupidly hard it is.
 * The Price Is Right post-Roger Dobkowitz (season 37-present) has been accused by longtime fans of being Nintendo Hard - from brutal pricing game setups to impossible to bid showcases, especially killing Double Showcase Winners. On the week of January 11-15, 2010, only three games were won.
 * To cite an individual game that's Nintendo Hard, look no further than the early game Bullseye (not to be confused with a much easier later game that shares the same name). The contestant had to use binary search ("higher... lower...") in order to zero in on the price of a car, similar to today's Clock Game. The only trouble was, rather than making as many guesses as they could within a given time limit (as is done with Clock Game), the contestant only had seven guesses period. To figure out the exact price of a four-digit car down to the dollar. The game was retired after less than two months, with nobody ever winning it.
 * UK kids Game Show Raven contains The Way Of The Warrior, an assault course played 3 times a week over each season's four week run. It's played by the contestant currently in last place, and it keeps being played until it's defeated. Over the first 8 seasons, it's been attempted 101 times, and won just four, and each time it's come back harder the next year... Not that no-one defeating it stops them upping the difficulty between seasons, it simply isn't guaranteed to be increased in difficulty unless someone beats it.
 * The earlier UK kids Game Show Knightmare had a similar record- 80 teams challenged the Dungeon of Deceit over the course of 8 series. 72 of them failed. The first and third series didn't have a single winner.
 * Wipeout imported the Japanese obstacle course show concept to the US... though they're nice enough to let you finish the course after you inevitably fall off the Big Balls. In fact, they play Nintendo Hardness for fun!
 * In a different vein, the unrelated UK quiz show Wipeout (also ported to the U.S. with Peter Tomarken as host), which had a fairly standard setup of picking the correct answers from the false ones, all displayed on a big screen. But picking an incorrect answer zeroed your entire winnings so far, each round continued until either all the correct answers or all the 'wipeouts' were found, and the prizes weren't much anyway. Players would usually pass after a correct answer rather than risk another one, and you'd frequently see two players going home with nothing and the third with a hundred quid or so.

Tabletop Games
"E. Gary Gygax: Heh, heh. Oh, man. The Sphere of Annihilation in the statue's mouth. That never gets old."
 * Several Dungeons and Dragons modules have developed reputations for being "meat grinders" due to the high mortality rate of parties attempting to tackle them.
 * The original Tomb of Horrors module more than qualifies.


 * As is Throne of Bloodstone, the module that has your party going to the layer of the Abyss that Orcus resides in order to steal his artifact wand.
 * And then there's the Dark Sun module "Valley of Dust and Fire" which details the city of Ur Draxa, home of the Dragon of Tyr.
 * The whole Dark Sun-setting was intended to be the Nintendo Hard among the D&D-settings (though Planescape is more or less on par with it).
 * And let's not forget just about any dungeon created by a Killer Game Master.
 * Or even created by a normal DM. D&D is exceedingly lethal even without active malice on the part of the DM, it's just more so with it, and more arbitrarily so at that.
 * A lot of it - especially the latest (as of early 2011) Monster Manual - actually isn't that hard, so long as you have proper pacing and a well balanced team. Which leads to conversations like "What, you wiped with that? The tank shouldn't have been touched, and the healer should have been able to keep the AOE mitigated!" "Yeah except we have three melee damage-dealing guys in hide armor or less, and our 'healer' focused all his skills in attacks with a little control and heals himself first and foremost." ".... Ouch."
 * Dungeon magazine was rather infamous for publishing these, as well. There was one that included a nearly-inescapable room-filling-with-sand trap, the goal for the adventure being impossible to achieve without the (level eight to ten) party members having a wish spell available, and an efreet that literally could not be killed. The only way to even get rid of the efreet involved summoning a 20th-level priest of Set who's been dead and trapped in an amulet for several thousand years, has his full repertoire of combat spells to blast the party with, and is in a really bad mood. Other adventures were even more deadly.
 * Labyrinth of Madness - not only are the monsters and traps extremely deadly, but to progress past certain points, you need to find magical glyphs, without which certain parts of the dungeon (mainly the entrances to new areas) don't even exist for you. There are twenty in all, and you're pretty much screwed if you miss even one. (To make matters worse, the original printing has a typo that makes one of them impossible to actually get, but honestly, most groups will give up before this actually becomes a problem.)
 * There was a comic book adaptation of the Labyrinth of Madness. The dwarven fighter was instant-killed off about 3 pages in, turned into a zombie and sent back to attack his friends. Says it all, really.
 * The Skinsaw Murders, a Pathfinder adventure path installment, is infamous for TPKs. Lots of ghouls, who's paralysis attack can be very cheap and very nasty, a haunted house full of unavoidable "Haunts", one of which forces you to jump out a window, possibly hitting the water some 50 ft below, or run outside into a flock of undead crows. And the final boss encounter...no. Just no.
 * The Cthulhu Mythos board game Arkham Horror is extremely difficult. The randomly drawnly opponent Eldritch Abomination Big Bad changes a number of rules, monsters, and often has instant-kill conditions should the game end in a final battle. Strategy and teamwork is mandatory, random events and blind luck will usually ruin your plans, and it's all a Race Against the Clock. Expansions for the game generally exist to make the game ever harder, such as adding The Dragon or The Corruption to the mix. In general, you don't expect to win a given game, completely appropriate to the setting.
 * This intense difficulty can be avoided by using custom characters. Even if they themselves are not unbalanced, putting them together, each designed for a certain task (i.e. one is made to close and explore gates, another is combat, another is movement, etc), makes the game from something incredibly difficult to relatively easy - even beating the end abominations becomes a fairly simple task.
 * Call of Cthulhu, the RPG, is usually murderously difficult to survive. Characters are at risk of death from a single rifle round, and many monsters deal enough damage that player characters who are hit have almost no chance to survive. The Corruption is killing you, your Sanity Meter is killing you, the McGuffin is killing you, the Tome of Eldritch Lore is killing you... They're not trying. They're succeeding.
 * The Lone Wolf Gamebook series got progressively more difficult around book eight or so, but never really reached this level of madness...except for The Prisoners Of Time. In addition to the usual death traps and Random Number God bullshit, there were three extremely difficult fights right at the end. In the first, if you brought the Infinity+1 Sword from an earlier book, the boss' stats were nearly impossible to overcome. The second featured similar issues, regardless of equipment. And the third was on the next entry, giving you no chance to heal, and you started by taking unavoidable damage.
 * Friend Computer would like to remind you that only Commie Mutant Traitors would say the Troubleshooters in Paranoia are given six clones because of the stunningly high death rate in Alpha Complex. Complaining about a 2% survival rate at one week is treason. This information is above your clearance level, Citizen; please report to your nearest termination center immediately or wait for your local extermination team. Have a wonderful daycycle!
 * Hunter: The Reckoning stresses its brutal difficulty in its fluff. The rules are not on the same level as Call of Cthulhu. However, if the Game Master decides to use the rules in the game lines for other supernaturals in the Old World of Darkness, the Player Characters are mayflies.
 * Betrayal at House on the Hill has many scenarios which are won or lost based on victory conditions. However, before the endgame begins, players have found items, gained and lost stats, and explored the house. End-games range from fair challenges to virtually impossible.
 * The Deadlands dime novel adventure Night Train is alternately referred to as PC Death Train. A locomotive carrying thirty nosferatu and a zombie conductor (and not one of those relatively easy to beat head shot zombies) will do that. Rumors that its writer John Goff gets a royalty every time running it ends in a Total Party Kill are officially denied, however.
 * Battlestar Galactica the board game is extremely hard for a traitor game. Often favoring the Cylon rather than the Humans. More often than not the Cylons win.

Other

 * The casino game "Diana" Surprisingly old, predating Nintendo, the TV itself, and even radio! was introduced to the Wild West in the 1800s, but did not gain popularity as the odds were apparently murderous.
 * Most puzzle- or skill-based toys are simple once you get the trick. However, there are a few that remain fiendishly difficult, even after hours of practice. Worth special mention is one that consists of a box topped by a tilting platform, controlled by two knobs on the sides. The object is to navigate a marble through the maze on the platform by tilting it using the knobs. It wouldn't be that hard, except that the platform has a bunch of holes in it in addition to the walls of the maze. Falling through a hole forces you to start over, and all it takes is a momentary lapse in concentration.
 * There is now a 3-dimensional version of that puzzle, encased in a clear plastic sphere. This one offers a "save point", but also many new challenges.
 * Homestar Runner parodied this trope. There's the easter egg game "Super Kingio Bros," in which you cannot possibly avoid the first enemy, who you find within the first second of the game.