Now, I’d never be so bold as to consider myself generally good at games. What I am is stubborn enough to attempt the same challenge over and over until I scrape through. Usually.
Powered by sheer determination, I was the first among my friends at school to beat Emerald Weapon in Final Fantasy 7. I was also the first to win the deviously difficult race against Beemer in forgotten PS1 release Speed Freaks, an excellent kart racer.
No other teenage gamer I ever knew unlocked that character. Nor did they conquer 1991 brawler Battletoads. Gentle reader, I cannot tell a lie: Neither did I.
There have always been games marked by their difficulty, even defined by it. The original Crash Bandicoot, for instance (you deserved a glorious victory dance at the end of that one), or the great bag of malevolent evil that is FromSoftware’s entire output to date. Battletoads, somehow, has achieved notoriety even beyond that. The hardest Soulsborne bosses have nothing on this one.
It’s not that it’s a long game. How Long To Beat suggests a completion time of 3 and a half hours for the Sega Genesis version, if you’re only looking to complete the campaign. Presumably, this doesn’t count the decade or so of failed attempts in between.
Things start reasonably enough. Ragnarok’s Canyon and Wookie Hole, the first two levels, present the game as a brawler that will flip perspectives, add new mechanics, and keep things fresh. The latter scrolls vertically is a sort of abseiling/brawling experience, which is certainly novel.
Next up was a vehicle level, and this was where everything went very wrong for me. And countless others. Turbo Tunnel sees our toad friends leaping in a speeder and blasting down a track riddled with obstacles.
As was the style at the time, players were provided with no more than a brief flash of where these obstacles will be on the track, giving just moments for evasive action. The action then got more frantic and different types of hazards were introduced, making for one difficult level to conquer.
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Toad-ally Unbeatable For Most Players
I’m a huge fan of beat ‘em ups of the era, such as Altered Beast and Golden Axe. Battletoads added a sort of futuristic, Earthworm Jim-esque style to the whole concept.
It’s a game I really wanted to love, and still do. It, however, is still as determined to hate me as it was a whole generation in the 90s.
A lot of this will be nothing new to those who grew up with the games of the time, of course. I recently replayed The Lion King for the Sega Genesis, and though I finished it, I struggled to do so just as much as I did over thirty years ago.
Speaking on The Game Informer Show podcast in 2019, The Lion King’s Genesis and SNES creative director, Louis Castle, provided some insight into why those early games are so infernally difficult: Blockbuster video game rentals. He said:
“If [players] rented it and they took it home and they got too far in the game, Disney’s analytics showed that … they wouldn’t buy the game. And so it was critically important to Disney that … they not get more than a certain percentage of the game before one night’s rental.”
Per Castle, this is how all that “roar at monkeys” business in the Just Can’t Wait To Be King level came to be so ridiculous. Incidentally, that level also contains an array of obstacle-dodging moments like Battletoads’ Turbo Tunnel.
It’s not just about money, though. The simple fact is that Battletoads, The Lion King and so many other titles are just a product of a time when games were infuriatingly difficult.
Take another of my favorites, the fantastic sequel Mega Man 2. I completed this one only through a steady process of trial and error, learning boss weaknesses, where specific enemies spawn from, the route through arrangements of deadly spikes, and other horrors.
Given this persistence, then, it’s quite a feat for Battletoads’ developers that I never beat their game. It’s not one of the Genesis’ most influential titles, perhaps, but it’s absolutely among the hardest.
On YouTube, you can now marvel at players battling their way through the game without taking any damage. More power to them, I say.
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