From the Memory Bank: My History with Video Games

Battletoads - Advancing to the Next Level

How my relationship with Rare's brutally tough NES action game changed over the years and ultimately helped me to evolve as a player.

Now here's one of the best examples of a game suddenly taking on a new meaning and inspiring me to significantly change the way that I regard it.

That's how my story with 1991's Battletoads has been playing out.

For the longest time, it wasn't a happy story, no. My relationship with Battletoads was largely unhealthy. I had a low opinion of the game and considered it to be an ill-conceived, cruelly designed brawler-platformer hybrid whose inexplicable focus on extreme difficulty made it completely inaccessible and virtually unplayable.

I didn't like it, and I mostly stayed away from it.

And that was a shame because it obviously had some very endearing qualities: It was creative, it was ambitious, it was impressively designed, and it was a technical marvel. It was a pure showcase in pushing an aging console to its limits and creating a product that appeared to transcend the technology that was powering it.

But at the time, none of that mattered to me because I couldn't see Battletoads in any context other than "unmerciful game that was designed to inflict pain and suffering on those who dared to invite its company."

As far as I was concerned, Battletoads existed to destroy the childhoods of 80s and 90s kids everywhere.

It was the work of Satan, himself.

Back in 1991, though, it was a much different story. I was actually pretty excited about Battletoads. From what I was seeing in Nintendo Power's coverage of the game, it appeared as though Rare's latest was shaping up to be one of the best new beat-'em-ups to come around in a long time!

Graphically it looked next-level, and some of ideas and mechanics that it was introducing (the heroes being able to transmogrify their limbs and even their entire bodies into different pummeling objects, the heroes having unique attacks in each stage, and enemy encounters occurring in 3D spaces) were promising to evolve the genre in a significant way.

"This game has all of the hallmarks of a major release," I thought to myself as I read the previews and examined their screenshots. "It might very well be the next big NES game!"

Also, the game had another powerful element working in its favor: recent developments in kids' entertainment and specifically the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles' complete takeover of American culture.

At that moment in time, companies were aggressively attempting to replicate the Turtles' success and create an answer to it, and resultantly, teams of anthropomorphic heroes became the new big thing. And every entertainment and toy company in the country was vying for a slice of the new market.

And Rare and its publishing partner, Tradewest, were two of those companies. They attempted to capitalize on the trend with their new group of unfortunately-named amphibious heroes. And their tactic worked on on my friends and I because the Turtles were all the rage with us and we were apt to get excited about any team of heroes that was modeled after theirs.

So I had interest in Battletoads because it combined two of my favorite things: beat-'em-ups and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. And even though I'd become increasingly wary of 8-bit beat-'em-ups following poor experiences with shoddily designed genre entries like Bad Dudes, Target: Renegade and Double Dragon III: The Sacred Stones, I wasn't hesitant to give the latest entry a fair chance. Because it looked that good.

So when Battletoads finally hit store shelves, I rushed right out and bought it.

And for at least the first few minutes, Battletoads was absolutely living up to the hype. Every single one of the game's aspects was screaming "quality"--everything from its eye-catching, impressively detailed graphics to its strikingly-well-composed, surprisingly emotive music to its interesting-looking, creative environments.

The Toads' exaggerated finishing moves, in which their limbs would grow comically large in size as they delivered crushing final blows, were an instantly appealing differentiator. They demonstrated for me, right away, that this game was bringing something legitimately new to the table. "We're introducing a whole new style of action," they said.

And I was on board with that. I loved the novel way in which the Toads delivered punishment. It looked cool, and it had strong visceral appeal (I'd literally grit my teeth and jump in my chair any time I'd violently send a foe flying offscreen with a giant punch or kick).

"What fun!" I'd think as I walloped an enemy with my oversized fist or boot and listened to the satisfying sound effect that accompanied the action.

In those opening minutes, the game also did an excellent job of exhibiting its uniquely zany personality and sending the strong message that it wasn't here to play by the established rules.

My favorite example of its blatant disregard for convention were the "Space Invaders" that would would suddenly appear and attempt not to damage me with attacks or physical contact but to instead literally steal units of energy from my health meter in the HUD. I'd never seen anything like that in a video game. It was a weird type of fourth-wall-breaking material and kinda jarring for that reason, but at the same time, it was super-interesting and it felt excitingly new.

And outside-the-box occurrences like these and the opening stage's second-person-perspective boss battle did well to acclimate me to the game's absurdist, revolutionary nature and make me eager to see what it was doing to do next.

In truth, I wasn't as excited for Battletoads, itself, pre-release as much as I was excited about what it was purported to represent: the return of quality beat-'em-ups to the NES and the evolution of NES technology. But after I experienced the game's action, everything changed. I was now wholly invested in the game, itself, and what it was doing gameplay-wise. I was impressed by what I was seeing from the Impact Crater and Chasm stages (whose positions were helpfully identified on the game's gorgeously rendered between-stage map), and I couldn't wait to see what was waiting for me in the next stage!

The developers' ambition was palpable, and as I gauged their efforts, the only thing I could think was, "This game is for real!"

Tragically, though, it turned out that the game's first two stages were simply a red herring. They were, I soon learned, a deceptive calm that was designed to shroud the violent storm that was quietly awaiting its opportunity to pummel me.

Yes, my friends: I'm talking about the Turbo Tunnel.

It was an absolute terror of a stage.

At the start, though, the Turbo Tunnel was able to belie its true nature by presenting more of the game's standard action. It had me jumping from platform to platform and beating up groups of enemies. "How very manageable," I thought.

But then, out of the blue, the game completely blindsided me with one of the most ridiculously challenging action segments I'd ever encountered in a game. It was a considerably fast, lengthy auto-scrolling segment that required me to tactically maneuver a hover-bike in all directions and thus avoid stone slabs that were appearing on different planes and doing so at progressively faster rates.

I hadn't even reached the third checkpoint before the movement and obstacle speeds increased to a point in which I could no longer adjust to them. At that point, it seemed as though the game was expecting me to exhibit some degree of precognition!

Honestly, I was fine with games having memorization-type challenges, but I also expected games that presented such challenges to play fair and give me the time and opportunity that I needed to memorize all of the patterns. Battletoads didn't do this. It gave me a limited amount of lives and only three continues, and that wasn't nearly enough play-time for me to memorize multiple sections' worth of obstacle locations.

As I crashed face-first into one stone slab after another, all I could do was watch on dispiritedly and try to comprehend the game's sudden and inexplicably huge spike in difficulty.

The hover-bike segment was maddening enough on its own, but what added an extra layer of aggravation was having to repeat the first two stages every time I wanted to get another shot at clearing it. Doing so was repetitive in a mentally exhausting way.

And it didn't help that the segment dragged on endlessly and never gave me an indication as to whether or not I was close to finishing it (for all I knew, the fourth checkpoint, which I was able to reach with much struggle, might have only been the segment's halfway point).

"If this is how challenging the game is in only its third stage," I thought to myself in a moment of great concern, "then how bad is it going to get in the proceeding stages?!"

I tried clearing the Turbo Tunnel dozens of times, but I simply couldn't do it. It was too difficult. And my only thought was that I just didn't possess the level of skill necessary to meet such a challenge. So I fell into a state of hopelessness.

"There's no way that I'm ever going to be able to beat this stage," I said with an exasperated energy.

And this was a sad occurrence because just minutes before, I was really enjoying Battletoads. I was having a blast with what I viewed to be one of the boldest, most inventive NES beat-'em-ups I'd played in a long, long time.

But now I'd completely soured on the game. And I couldn't envision any future in which I possessed the skill necessary to make it to the next stage or, less likely, see the game through to the end.

In the weeks that followed, I made several attempts to clear the Turbo Tunnel, but each time, I met the same fate. Consequently I wasn't even able to gain any confidence.

It wasn't that I had bad reflexes, no. My reflexes were actually pretty sharp. It was just that there were points in which I couldn't understand what the game wanted from me.

Two parts in particular always did me in: The first was the one in which I was forced to make my own jumps. I couldn't figure out how much directional influence was required, and I didn't know when to push the jump button. And quite often, my Toad would, for whatever reason, miss a platform and instead fly off into the foreground, to his death. Whenever I made it past that section, I felt as though I only did so because I got lucky.

The other part was the final mach-speed zigzagging section. I was certain that I had down, but the game continued to insist otherwise. No matter how fast I alternated between the up- and down-directional, I'd inevitably smash into the stone slabs, and I'd never understand why. "What the hell do you want from me, game?!" I'd ask in my anger.

And eventually I became so defeated that I simply gave up on the idea of clearing the Turbo Tunnel. It didn't seem worth the effort. "Because after all," I thought, "even if I somehow make it past this stage, there's no way that I'll be able to handle whatever comes next."

So I decided that it was probably for the best to shelve Battletoads and never touch it again.

Naturally I wasn't able to hold to that position, and I found myself returning to Battletoads every couple of months or so for my next futile attempt at clearing the Turbo Tunnel.

But in time, despite my having slotted myself as someone who wasn't capable of pulling off advanced gaming feats, I actually did become skilled enough to clear the Tunnel Turbo, and I was able to do so without dropping a single continue. For the first time in a while, I exhibited real growth.

And from there, it was on to the Ice Tunnel stage, which was, as I expected, considerably difficult. I also struggled with this stage for the longest time, but I remained persistent and continued to try to clear it, my push fueled largely by my belief that I could conquer Battletoads one stage at a time if I kept advancing at a good pace.

Sadly, though, it didn't work out that way. What happened, instead, was that reality came crashing down on me after I finally cleared the Ice Tunnel and found out what was next: Surf City, which featured another series of auto-scrolling vehicle sections (or "surfboard sequences," in this case).

My experience with the auto-scrolling sections unfolded very similarly to the one I had with the Turbo Tunnel's. But these sections were actually worse because their logs' shifting patterns were indiscernible and their incredibly-difficult-to-avoid whirlpools killed you instantly!

"Nuh-uh. No way," I thought to myself as I was playing through the stage's auto-scrolling sections. "I'm not doing this again."

I'd finally had enough. After I used up all of my lives and continues, I switched off the NES and declared that I was done with Battletoads. And this time I was serious.

Well, more accurately, I was serious about giving up on the idea of beating the game legitimately.

The truth was that wanted to see the rest of the game--mostly for curiosity's sake (and partly to find out what other horrors it contained). I was so determined to do so that I resorted to using a Game Genie and infinite-lives code.

I figured that having unlimited lives would put me on easy street, but I couldn't have been more mistaken. It turned out that I couldn't beat Battletoads even when I was cheating!

The biggest obstacle--and the most prominent object of my loathing--was the dreadful Clinger Winger, whose movement mechanic was easy to understand but seemingly impossible to execute. I couldn't tell if the game was looking for directional input before, when or after I reached a corner, and there was never any indication as to which inputs were causing me to slow down.

The stage had no checkpoints, and it was never interested in providing me any sort of leeway. If I made a single mistake--if I slowed down for even a tenth of a second--the hypnotic orb would catch up to me and kill me instantly.

That orb caught me every time.

And I wasn't sure why. I couldn't tell if I was simply misunderstanding something about the stage's movement mechanic or if my controller was damaged (the d-pad might have been worn out from years of abuse, I started to consider).

I didn't know, and I didn't care. After all: I was too busy seething over the notion that some group of psychos had aimed to create a game that was so unfathomably difficult that it was unbeatable even with a Game Genie! I might have lost my mind had I not angrily switched off the NES after enduring an hour's-worth of failures.

"How in the hell do they expect me to make it this far into the game and complete this ridiculously challenging stage with only three continues?!" I wondered while succumbing to mental exhaustion. (I was aware that warps existed, but I felt that trying to access any of them was a dangerous risk that would likely cost me a large number of lives.)

So yeah--the Clinger Winger stage was the most infuriating thing I'd ever encountered in a video game, and it was what finally broke me. I knew that there was no way I was ever going to clear it. And because that was true, there was no reason for me to continue playing Battletoads.

So I decided that it was time to leave the game behind.

The biggest tragedy in all of this, I thought, was that Battletoads' extreme level of difficulty prevented the majority of players from seeing the game's final two-thirds, which were loaded with original, innovative ideas and the most ambitious graphical design an NES game ever had. What Rare was able to accomplish with the NES' aging hardware was nothing short of remarkable.

I mean, consider some of the things that the game did: It introduced a second-person-perspective boss battle a year before the technologically advanced Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles IV: Turtles in Time presented the same idea while trumpeting it as an "advanced" new addition. It contained Mach-speed hover-bike action; snowball fights; in-transit giant-snake climbing; a segment in which you had to maneuver your way around projectile storms while riding a jet; a subterranean stage in which you had to outpace large spiked cogs and tangle with sharks, electric eels, and terrifying rubber ducks; tense races against giant rats; and, most impressively, a cylindrical tower that spun from left to right, using a wraparound effect, as you traversed its exterior portion (this tower appeared in The Revolution stage, which I didn't get the chance to see until the dawn of Internet video)!

And it did all of that while supporting two-player cooperative play and somehow doing so without causing the console to explode while attempting to render all of the action!

But unfortunately, most of the aforementioned went unrecognized and unappreciated because only a tiny portion of players was able to advance far enough to see any of it.

And that begged the question, "Why would a company put so much effort into a game's creation if it was going to set the difficulty so high that it would render the game unplayable to the majority of people?" (Doing something simple like giving players unlimited continues would have made the game more accessible, and it probably would persuaded more people to play it.)

"What a shame," I thought.

The fact was that Battletoads was just too damn hard, and I found no joy in playing it. Its challenges evoked nothing but feelings of anger and stress. They made me feel bad about myself. That's why I felt comfortable in my decision to shelve the game and never return to it.

And that, I thought, was where the relationship was going to end.

But the relationship wasn't truly over, no. I returned to the game every once in a while, but usually I only did so to mess around in the opening two stages, both of which I genuinely enjoyed playing through, and prove to myself that I could still clear the Turbo Tunnel.

In that time, I never had any designs on actually trying to beat the game because, I was convinced, I simply wasn't skilled enough to do so. I continued to tell myself that I was never going to be an "advanced player," which, I determined, was what you had to be to beat such a game. So I thought that it was pointless to even try. And I made sure to put the thought out of my mind.

"Leave Battletoads and its kind to the masters," I thought to myself.

At the same time, though, I couldn't deny that the thought of not beating the game was weighing on me. Choosing to avoid making the attempt felt like running from a challenge, which was something that I just didn't do. And I hated feeling that way.

But what could I do? I simply wasn't on that level, and I knew that it would take a tremendous amount of work and effort to get anywhere close to it. At that point in my life, I wasn't prepared to make that kind of effort. I couldn't find time to do so because I was too busy dealing with important real-life issues. They, naturally, were my top priority.

And besides: There were too many other games to play! "Why would I want to spend a hundred hours attempting to learn Battletoads' stages," I was inclined to think, "when I could instead use that time to do something more enjoyable like seek out and play hidden gems and undiscovered classics?"

Slowly and painfully grinding my way through Battletoads just didn't sound like a fun option. So I chose not to do it. And I decided that it was best to continue keeping the game at a distance.

It went on like that for more than a decade. I kept my distance from the game, and I refrained from engaging with it on a deeper level. If I was around it, then it was only because I was watching people play it on YouTube or Twitch. "Let these game gods deal with this nightmare game," I continued to say to myself as I watched on.

But the problem was that it wasn't just the game gods who were beating Battletoads. Certain other people were starting to do it, too, and they were among the sort who really weren't as skilled as I was. And admittedly, seeing them beat the game made me feel inadequate.

At that point, I was out of excuses. I could no longer justify running away from the challenge. "If they can do it," I wondered, "then why can't I?"

That's when my competitive spirit activated and I became filled with determination. And promptly I became intent on proving that I could beat the game, too!

So finally I decided to start playing around with the game and seeing what I could do with it. As I engaged in this process, I learned something about myself.

Of course, it wasn't like I was new to the game, no. I knew a lot about it going in. I'd played through 95% of it with the Game Genie, so I had an understanding of all of its different stage mechanics. I'd seen other people play it, so I was aware of the most effective tactics and strategies. And at different points in the previous two decades, I spent time practicing certain stages for specific reasons (for reasons like putting together the original version of this piece in 2015, which required me to practice certain stages so that I could get a true sense of them and thus discover the most interesting spots to snap screenshots).

I had a head start.

And the fact was that I'd grown significantly over the previous few years. I'd beaten a lot of super-difficult games (Blaster Master, Earthworm Jim, arcade Ghosts 'n Goblins, Alien Soldier, Kid Chameleon, and plenty of others) and vastly improved as a player (I further sharpened my reflexes, developed better button-mashing skills, and even gained the ability to hyperfocus and see games' action in slow motion).

In that time, I had multiple "Matrix moments," as I call them--victories that helped me to see that I really was capable of beating the toughest games in existence. I was an "advanced player" all along, I learned. It was just that I lacked confidence and wasn't always applying myself. Because, like I said, I didn't think that it was worth putting in a real effort to beat the toughest games because I was convinced that I wasn't good enough to do so and that I'd fail no matter how hard I tried.

I didn't really believe in myself.

But that had since changed. Now I knew that not only was I good enough--I was one of the best in the world.

The Battletoads victory attempt was also the culmination of another life event: my mission to beat all of the games that had gotten the best of me in my younger years. By that point, I'd basically completed it. I'd beaten games like Haunted Castle, Rolling Thunder, Impossible Mission, NES Bad Dudes, and about two dozen others.

And Battletoads was the last obstacle to completing the mission. It was the final boss. I had to beat it if I wanted to legitimately call myself an "advanced player."

So I got to it. I started grinding the game and undergoing the trials. In the process, I got in a lot of practice and became proficient at clearing the toughest stages. "I know what I have to do to win," I felt confident in thinking.

It was just that I wasn't sure when to really go for it and make my first real attempt at beating the game. I kept putting it off and looking toward some hypothetical future point in which I'd feel I was finally ready. And ultimately, I settled on making my attempt during an upcoming weekend and specifically one in which nothing else was going on. "That should be one or two weeks from now," I thought.

But I ended up not waiting that long. One random night, on a whim, I decided to load up the game and make an attempt to beat it. I wasn't confident that I was ready, but I went for it anyway.

And on that night, it finally happened: I beat Battletoads for the first time!

The victory was a major event in my gaming life. It carried a lot of significance. It represented the completion of my ascension and the formalization of my "advanced player" status. Also, it lifted the burden that had been weighing on me since the mid-90s. I was no longer consumed by the fear.

I was finally in the place that I'd always longed to be.

What the victory did, also, was give me the confidence boost that I needed to challenge all of the other games that I'd put in Battletoads' category--games to which I never bothered to return, even during the phase in which I was seeking out hard games, because I told myself that they were beyond my level. In the following weeks and months, I played through and beat Ninja Gaiden III: The Ancient Ship of Doom, the arcade Contras, pretty much all of the other Battletoads games, and many other supremely tough games.

I was in the zone.

And I'm still there now. My confidence is high, and I'm looking to take down many more of the most difficult games ever made!

"So where would you say your relationship with Battletoads is now, you braggadocios freak?" you ask rudely but curiously. "And has your opinion on the game changed at all?"

Well, I'd say that Battletoads and I are past the reconciliation phase and currently on great terms. I now respect the game more than I fear it. So my feelings for it are a lot healthier than they once were.

As for my opinion on the game: It has changed, yes. I now consider it to be a very good action game and a legitimate NES classic.

I still think that its sometimes-extreme level of difficulty and unforgiving nature serve to evoke feelings of anxiety and stress and thus diminish the fun factor (and furthermore make the game uninviting to the average player), but that doesn't change my opinion that the game is impressively designed, tremendously creative, visually striking, musically and aurally brilliant, and worth experiencing for all of those reasons (even if you have to use save-states and such to see the majority of it).

It has too many outstanding qualities to be ignored.

And going forward, Battletoads will continue to impact my life in a positive way. Its influence will stay with me and push me to grow and become better, and my memories of beating it will always serve as the encouragement that I need to bravely face tough video-game challenges and overcome them.

That's Battletoads' legacy: It started as a game that demoralized me and made me feel as though I was a lesser player, but ultimately it became the game that significantly increased my confidence and helped me to advance to the next level.

And ain't that the biggest turnaround ever?