Curtain Fire.

Bullet Curtain.

...etc

These games have TONS of names.

Touhou is the reigning champion of them though.

Games have been getting easier and easier for decades. All games used to be no-hit games. Then they gave us powerups that let us take two hits to die instead of one. Then they gave us continues. Then they gave us health bars. Then they gave us adjustable difficulty settings. Then they gave us in-game tutorials and hints. Then they gave us rechargeable body armor. Now we get games like Grand Theft Animal Crossing which won't even let you die.

(I'm not saying today's games are too easy to be fun. I'm just saying that this list is crap.)

Well how many people that say Ninja Gaiden isn't hard have actually finished normal mode campaign ( I mean normal, not hard, very hard or master ninja, the last 2 difficulties being immensey harder than normal...)

So nobody here ever played Rick Dangerous. One of the toughest game ever, released in 1989, with hidden traps every seconds. Just the first level for your gaming pleasure :

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LW8B0dkjq4Q

Easily disprovable generalization. 

The video I posted above is of a game released in 2004.  Feel free to pee your pants while watching (the music is also brilliant).

This list fails a bit considering many pre-90's games and other games on the ZX Spectrum etc. And what about horror's like Space Harrier, or most arcade games for that matter? Anyone remember Knight Lore on the spectrum?

The biggest joke of all the games on that list is Portal. Me and everyone of my friends finished it in one sitting and I bet that is the norm worldwide.

I agree that the Hardest difficulty of the game shoudln't count.

One real bugger that I recall from being a kid was Life Force on NES. Daaaamn that game screwed with me. Beat it in the end. Tried it again a while ago and it f****d me up all over again. :)

 These guys never played really hard games, I'm amazed... A look at that list says a lot about their poor skill level.

Ninja Gaiden series for #1? really? Back in 1992 my then 10-year old sister almost finished the first NES game (made it to 6-2) just an example, and that's the hardest of the classics. However, you can finish Ninja Gaiden 1 and 2 without dying in under 20, 30 minutes respectively (I do), and Ninja Gaiden 3 in under 24 minutes dying just once (time runs out on last level). Ninja Gaiden BLACK for Xbox is indeed one of the most difficult games if you play it on "VERY hard" and "Master Ninja" difficulty.

Phantasy Star 2 is hard as hell too, and that's a JRPG. I would say it belongs in the top 20, for sure.

And Megaman 9 is not harder than Megaman1 for NES.

I agree with that.

Uh why wasn't Top gun mentioned? You can't even land (withough the power glove that is)

I should have added "Outside of a minority of SHMUP masochists."  Yeah I know about bullet hell games and they're really fun to watch.  They make our current top 50 games every month look like dumbed down casual trash.  Bullet hell gamers are the only true 1337 hardcore gamers around.  Ikaruga's about as much as I can handle, and barely.

But I think bullet hell games are some sort of sick demented alternate future of 80s gaming, where 2D games, which were already hard as hell, just got harder and harder, instead of getting replaced with easier 3D versions.  I don't know of any 3D equivalent to that madness.  I guess a 3D version of bullet hell would be trying to fly through the virtual reality area in The Lawnmower Man, and rotating your body to fit through tiny holes in the walls.  They should make one like that on Wii and PS3 for tilt controls to rotate your body.

@_mevildan, I loooooooooooove Life Force.  The escape at the ending haunted my youth with fun and excitement and fear.