You didn't stand a chance.
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00:00 Have you conquered every FromSoftware title, bested the likes of Cuphead, and maybe you
00:04 want to find a new Mount Everest?
00:06 Well, there's really no such thing as a title that no one can beat, thanks to the
00:10 collective time and dedication of the games community, so what does that leave us with?
00:15 Whilst the following games, largely of the retro variety, might not even be that hard,
00:20 for one reason or another, nobody has ever finished them.
00:23 I'm Si for WhatCulture.com, and these are 10 Video Games Nobody Has Beaten Because It's
00:29 Impossible.
00:30 10.
00:31 Space Station Silicon Valley
00:33 It's worth reiterating up front that there won't be a lot of modern games on this list.
00:37 While the industry has major issues in the current day with releasing games in broken
00:41 states, they are at least beatable, and if not, updates and patches make that a reality.
00:46 This isn't the case with older titles, such as 1998 Bizarro Platformer Space Station Silicon
00:52 Valley.
00:53 Developed by DMA Design, now known as Rockstar North, SSSV is a game with plenty of its own
01:00 quirks.
01:01 You control a microchip that can attach itself and take control of a variety of robot animals
01:06 to complete your goals.
01:07 However, there's one goal that eludes every player - a trophy that spawns in the level
01:11 Fat Bear Mountain cannot be picked up no matter what you try.
01:16 This means you can roll the credits, but not officially 100% the title.
01:19 Daniel Leydon, a programmer at DMA Design, apologised for this as recently as 2021 in
01:26 a YouTube comment of all places, remarking that he tweaked the item's collision elsewhere
01:30 without thinking of the further consequences.
01:33 Leydon went on to joke that he won DMA's worst bug award for the mistake, which is
01:37 cute in retrospect.
01:39 But it must have been pretty mortifying at the time, knowing you were the reason N64
01:43 players could never reach that coveted 100%.
01:46 9.
01:47 Great Guryanos ZX Spectrum
01:49 Superstar video game programmers are few and far between, but David Perry really made a
01:53 name for himself in the early 90s.
01:55 He put his hand to several classics like Earthworm Jim, Cool Spot and Disney's Aladdin for
02:00 Mega Drive, formed Shiny Entertainment and was all around a charismatic individual.
02:05 However, his name is rather prominently featured in a game that is unfortunate enough to feature
02:09 in a list like this.
02:11 The infamous Taito released an arcade fighter called Gladiator and selected the Small Studio
02:16 Elite system to craft a ZX Spectrum version for gamers at home in 1987.
02:21 Now renamed to Great Guryanos to avoid copyright issue, Perry really struggled to reduce the
02:26 size of the game down to the much smaller Spectrum cassette.
02:30 Desperate times called for desperate measures and Perry decided that the cuts would have
02:33 to include the game's ending.
02:35 In order to try and save face on this, he made the final boss of the title an invincible
02:39 skeleton.
02:40 The programmer has named the game his most hated piece of work, but this is probably
02:44 little solace to the ZX Spectrum fans who grew up facing down this unscrupulous skeleton
02:50 and inevitably lost.
02:51 8.
02:52 Bubble Bobble Revolution - USA 1 Version
02:55 It's always sad to think of once arcade classics like Bubble Bobble and how they have
02:59 not only failed to stay relevant, but had their legacy tarnished.
03:03 Bubble Bobble Revolution was released for the Nintendo DS and was instantly met with
03:07 critical revile.
03:08 Right off the bat, the character art for the box of Bub and Bob and their cold, dead eyes
03:13 is bad enough.
03:14 But the game inside was lazy and tired, hardly offering much worthwhile revision.
03:18 It was additionally a buggy mess of collision issues and even instances where entire levels
03:23 could randomly be skipped.
03:24 However, the North American version specifically was much worse.
03:29 Despite the game having 100 levels in Japan and Europe, the American copy gets as far
03:33 as level 30 before becoming unplayable.
03:36 The boss of said stage doesn't spawn and thus players can't move on.
03:39 Considering the American version came nearly a full year after the original Japanese release,
03:44 how does this happen?
03:45 Codemasters, who published the title in America, apologised and released a fixed version, but
03:50 the USA 1 version still lurks out there in the depths of eBay, unbeatable and selling
03:56 for several hundred dollars.
03:58 So it might be a turd, but now it's a price-fetching collector's item of a turd.
04:02 7.
04:03 Dr. Mario - Game Boy
04:04 You might be thinking, that can't be right, a game as legendary as Dr. Mario.
04:09 Yes, in a sense.
04:11 First of all, it's important to talk about the existence of the arcade kill screen.
04:15 When classic arcade titles like Pac-Man and Donkey Kong run long enough, they eventually
04:19 get to a point where the system hits its processing limit.
04:22 In the former's case, the cap is 255 stages and when the game tries to load level 256,
04:27 it instead spawns a garbled mess of graphics.
04:31 To a degree, this is the end of the game.
04:33 Since the developers didn't anticipate players getting this far, they never bothered to program
04:37 a proper ending, and fans tend to celebrate getting so far that the game can't actually
04:42 run anymore.
04:43 Dr. Mario is a weird example, though, for a few reasons.
04:47 First of all, the credits do play after beating level 20, but then following this, the game
04:51 continues, which is unique.
04:53 However, there is no graphical mess to celebrate when the game finally stops at level 28.
04:58 The virus is to clear spawn, but Dr. Mario himself is suddenly missing.
05:02 Well what happened?
05:03 Did Dr. Mario spend too much time around infectious diseases and couldn't show up for work
05:07 one day?
05:08 Who's going to clean up these viruses?
05:10 It's a bit of an anticlimax, and not much of an ending.
05:13 6.
05:14 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles - DOS & Amiga
05:17 The 1989 NES TMNT game is pretty bloody hard.
05:21 For most kids growing up with the title, it was realistically a game with just three areas
05:25 that come to a screeching halt when they get to the brutal Hudson River Dam.
05:29 But this is nothing compared to the DOS and Amiga versions of the game that right away
05:33 pulls out a trick that stops the drop-kicking, pizza-eating mutant reptiles in their tracks.
05:39 Across the game's first level, players take their preferred turtle across the streets
05:43 of New York and into the sewer system.
05:45 However, there is a particular jump to cross that is actually impossible.
05:49 No matter what you try, there's not enough room to leap to the next platform thanks to
05:52 a low ceiling that sends you plummeting into the sewage below.
05:56 Now people have beaten this game, and not just with cheats.
05:59 The European version of Turtles corrects the problem.
06:02 However, most bizarrely, later reissues of the game in America addressed other things
06:06 in the code, but not this jump.
06:08 Keen players weren't to be deterred though.
06:10 Using hex editing software, it's possible to move your turtle along past the jump, where
06:15 you will find another impossible leap.
06:17 Finally, the shredder figured out how to conquer his foes, and all it took was a few spare
06:21 bricks and some mortar.
06:23 5.
06:24 Smash TV - Arcade Version 1.0
06:26 1990s Smash TV was an odd sci-fi dystopic top-down shooter.
06:31 Inspired by the Schwarzenegger film The Running Man, the setting is a futuristic game show
06:35 where blood sports have become the norm.
06:37 You, alongside a friend, will fight hordes of enemies to the death.
06:40 Your prizes vary wildly from cash to toasters, and there's some tempting talk of something
06:45 called the Pleasure Dome.
06:46 Supposedly, if you were good enough, this would unlock after beating the final boss.
06:50 Pretty clear objective, right?
06:52 Get enough keys, rack up enough points, and make your way into this promised paradise.
06:56 However, there's actually no such thing.
06:59 Despite harping on about it, it's not in the original arcade game, because the developers
07:03 didn't think that players would be good enough to get to the Pleasure Dome.
07:06 Sure, Smash TV is tough, but they underestimated hardcore gamers that wouldn't back down
07:11 from a challenge.
07:12 As such, the 2.0 release of the arcade version, as well as all subsequent home console ports,
07:17 included the hidden bonus level.
07:19 Finally, you could surround yourself with a legion of pixelated women.
07:23 Was it worth it?
07:24 4.
07:25 Tales of Eternia PSP
07:26 RPGs, by their very nature, can often have some unfortunately unwinnable situations.
07:32 If you're underleveled or are able to sell key items for some reason, you can find yourself
07:36 needing to restart your journey to correct these unfortunate mistakes.
07:41 Tales of Destiny 2 released for the PS1 in 2000 and in 2001 in Japan and America, but
07:46 Europe didn't see this instalment in a series until 2006 when it came to the PSP as Tales
07:52 of Eternia.
07:53 This time, it was American players who missed out, and they might actually be thankful for
07:58 it, as the game is remembered by European folks as more of a headache than anything
08:02 else.
08:03 When the player gets to the boss summon fight against Volt, the game will freeze.
08:07 This battle is about halfway through a 40 hour campaign.
08:10 That's a lot of time wasted.
08:12 What makes this even tougher is Namco's reprint, which is designed to fix the issue,
08:17 was made as subtle as possible.
08:19 You can't tell which version you've bought until you put it into your PSP.
08:23 The only way to know is that the re-release will force a PSP firmware update to version
08:27 2.5.
08:28 Fans looking to get a replacement copy, if they were unlucky, could wind up with multiple
08:33 versions of the first pressing of the game, which is totally unbeatable.
08:37 3.
08:38 Mario Party 4's Doors of Doom
08:41 We're getting really particular with this one, but it's such an incredible example
08:44 that needs to be included.
08:46 Most people would assume finishing a Mario Party title would simply include grabbing
08:49 all the unlockables and perhaps setting some high scores.
08:52 But in Mario Party 4, it's impossible to actually get to the end of one particular
08:57 minigame.
08:58 Doors of Doom is a single player minigame, which is as simple as it gets.
09:02 The player is presented with two doors, with a 50% chance of proceeding to the next room,
09:06 and a 50% chance of being stopped by Bowser.
09:09 There's no one to beat, it's about getting through as many doors as possible, however
09:13 that 50/50 split gets more tense every time.
09:17 On the one hand, there's no actual victory, but there is an end point.
09:21 At 30 doors opened, the next will always be Bowser, a hard-coded limit in the game.
09:26 However there's no recording of anyone ever legitimately getting this far.
09:30 The current world record is a total of 14 doors, not even half.
09:34 If you want to get mathematical about things, that's where the real juice is.
09:37 Because each room has a 50% chance of success, doing this 30 times makes for astronomical
09:43 odds.
09:44 It's calculated that the possibility of getting to the game's hard-coded end is
09:47 0.00000009%.
09:48 That's less than 1 in 1 billion.
09:55 This isn't a party, this is a nightmare.
09:58 2.
09:59 Robocop - Commodore 64 The 1988 Robocop multi-format release was
10:04 immensely popular.
10:05 In fact, somehow it became the best-selling video game in the United Kingdom of the entire
10:09 decade.
10:10 Take that Mario, Zelda and Pac-Man.
10:12 As such, gamers who grew up in Britain in the late 80s and early 90s might have a dreamy,
10:17 far-off look in their eyes when they think of it.
10:19 Unless they own the Commodore 64 version.
10:22 Level 3 of the game is literally designed to be impossible to beat thanks to the time
10:26 limit.
10:27 Old Robo-Roza simply doesn't move quickly enough to reach the goal.
10:31 This was imposed by the developers at Ocean for a very specific reason - to hide the truth.
10:36 See it is possible to get through level 3 by repeatedly crouching next to a specific
10:41 wall and pushing yourself through it.
10:43 On the other side, level 4 begins, which is a mess of tiles and sprites, completely unfinished
10:48 and unplayable.
10:49 Ah, that's why the time limit is so strict.
10:53 This is the worst example of a studio putting a band-aid over a broken bone.
10:57 Or perhaps more fittingly, a stop sign just an inch from a brick wall.
11:02 Robocop is broken, so let's just make it harder than it is so people give up.
11:06 Awful, awful stuff.
11:08 And number 1, Action 52 and the Cheetahmen series.
11:11 Where there's a money-making industry, there will be those looking to exploit it.
11:15 Legally dubious plug and play systems and homebrew multi-cart releases get by on the
11:19 promise of games just like the ones you love, or in the case of Action 52, having a buttload
11:25 of content.
11:26 After all, NES cartridges were quite small storage-wise, so including 52 in one is mind-bending.
11:32 Of course, this was a major selling point.
11:34 "My parents would only have to buy me one gift!"
11:36 Little Jimmy would exclaim in 1991, "and I'd have 52 new games to play."
11:41 Well, little hypothetical Jimmy, be careful what you wish for.
11:45 Not only would completing Action 52's contents be a slog because of most of the games being
11:50 unquestionably awful, it is outright impossible because of how equally broken they are.
11:55 The game's so-called featured title, Cheetahmen, is the most notable example.
11:59 Not only is it terrible, it features a game-breaking bug where you can become trapped and are forced
12:04 to use all of your lives to start from scratch.
12:07 To cap it all off, there somehow also exists a sequel.
12:10 The 15,000 copies of Cheetahmen 2 that were produced and left in a warehouse eventually
12:15 found themselves out in the wild.
12:17 Clearly unfinished, which begs the question of why it was even put on a cartridge in the
12:21 first place, Cheetahmen 2 cannot be beaten as it stops progressing after level 6 of 10.
12:27 The Cheetahmen are the mascots for the bad, the broken and the unbeatable.
12:31 Most of these unbeatable games are the result of weird development stories and if you'd
12:35 like to hear more development stories, why not check out this video on screen now for
12:38 10 video game risks that actually paid off for a more positive slant.
12:43 Don't forget to leave a comment down below on other games that you know about but can't
12:46 actually physically be beaten.
12:49 And don't forget to like this video, subscribe and head over to whatculture.com for more
12:52 content every day.
12:53 You can follow me on Twitter @signiac_123.
12:55 I've been Si for WhatCulture and have a good week.