Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles NES

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, released on NES in 1989 by Konami, arrived at the peak of the franchise’s first wave of mainstream popularity — and became notorious almost as quickly for being much harder than its cartoon-tie-in premise suggested. Players switch between all four turtles (Leonardo, Michelangelo, Donatello, Raphael), each controllable at will but sharing a single life pool, working through New York City to rescue April O’Neil and stop Shredder’s Technodrome.

The game mixes standard side-scrolling beat-’em-up stages with a small number of top-down maze-like sections — the underwater dam level, in particular, became infamous for its strict time limit and instant-death seaweed, cited for decades afterward as one of the hardest individual stages in any licensed NES game.

Despite — or partly because of — its reputation for brutal difficulty, it sold well enough that Konami followed it with Turtles II: The Arcade Game the following year, an entirely different and notably more forgiving beat-’em-up that became the more fondly remembered of the two NES Turtles games for most players.