Nintendo Hard/Game Show

• The Nickelodeon kids show Legends of the Hidden Temple had a really low success rate (less than 25%). The locked doors guaranteed that the artifact you need to find was in the LAST room you'd enter, and you had to perform tasks and solve puzzles in up to 12 rooms before you found it (some were simple, like the Throne of the Pretender, but others, like the Shrine of the Silver Monkey, messed EVERYONE up.) Adding to that were Temple Guards, who would "kidnap" you and would cause your teammate to have to start over from the beginning. Throw in darkness, shadows, music, fog, Kirk Fogg, and more than one kid ended up walking in circles with confused looks on their faces.
• The final round in Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego?? wasn't too bad if you knew about geography, but the final round of Where in Time Is Carmen Sandiego?? was painful. In theory, The Trail of Time wasn't too bad. There were six gates you had to pass through. Carmen asked a history question with two answers (EXAMPLE: It's 1960. The song "We Shall Overcome" is dedicated to which US protest movement? Civil Rights or Anti-War?) Get the answer right, the gate opens; Get it wrong, you have to perform some time-consuming task like pulling up a rock with a rope or spinning a wheel. This wouldn't be too bad, except they didn't put the gates in order. They were generally scattered around, and all the kids had to work with were a few blinking lights and the Engine Crew leading them around with airport flashlights. It was confusing enough to fuel the theory that they made the Trail of Time deliberately confusing so they wouldn't have to pay out the grand prize as often (Since Time was created after World's budget was cut down.)
  • World wasn't much better, the beacons the player had to place needed to be put in exactly the right spot or the sensor wouldn't register. Not only that but they were just slightly top-heavy and had a tendency to fall over and need to be replaced in order to win. Add in the fact that the locations were given in such an order that it usually forced the player to wind through beacons they had already placed (thus accidentally knocking them over and having to spend extra time putting them back up) led to man grand prizes lost.
• UK show The Crystal Maze was won by only a few teams in its entire run. The individual challenges to earn crystals ranged from dead simple to unfair, but what ultimately decided the difference between winning an adventure holiday or going home with only a souvenir paperweight was the Crystal Dome, a giant hollow wind chamber in the shape of a crystal in which the team would have a period of five seconds per crystal to grab at slips of foil, hoping to collect 100 more gold ones than silver ones.
• The Japanese sure do love creating sadistic obstacle course shows for the masses to humiliate themselves on:
  • Ninja Warrior is just pure obstacle course hell, with the obstacles becoming more and more difficult with each season. In all of its 23+ seasons of running, only three people have successfully completed all four levels of the competition. In fact, the show's design team have admitted that they try each tournament to make the first round so tough that no one could beat it.
    • The most devastating obstacle of them all, by far, is the Cliffhanger. It's basically a hand-strength obstacle placed in the middle of the 3rd round, where upper-body strength is the means to victory. The first three versions were rather simple, with anyone with enough hand strength able to get through it handily. Then came the 4th version, which included a rise so that most competitors would have to JUMP across the gaps between bars 2 and 3 to proceed, which was bad enough considering most contestants are EXHAUSTED by that point. Then, after the Urushihara beat the course, came the Ultimate Cliffhanger...
    • Possibly even worse is the female version of the tournament, which only one woman has successfully beaten (and she's done it three times!). In the most recent one, four of the original tournament's recurring competitors (dubbed the All-Stars) had each mentored a female competitor. None of their proteges made it past the first stage.
  • Takeshi's Castle is Nintendo Hard in TV game show form. It ran for three years, each episode had 100-142 starting contestants; only nine people ever won (this isn't including the joke episode where everybody won).
  • Unbeatable Banzuke mostly involves either getting through an insanely complicated obstacle course using an unusual method of travel (like walking on one's hands, on stilts, with a wheelbarrow, etc.), completing an oversized children's game, or performing as many exercise feats as possible within a time limit. Out of the hundreds that try their luck, only 2 or 3 on average manage to succeed, with the record before the show's cancellation being 7 wins.
  • Hole In The Wall is another game that's pretty difficult to win, due to the fact that most of the time the holes are way to small for the average contestants to fit through properly and if the hole is destroyed, the contestant loses the round regardless of whether they were pushed off of the course or not. The difficulty was shot Up to Eleven during the final round where the contestant was BLINDFOLDED and had to listen to their teammates instructions in order to get through the hole. Couple this with the fact that some of the later rounds had holes that were airborne in the MIDDLE of the wall, which required the contestant to blindly jump and get lucky enough to clear the hole and you can see why the success rate of the winners is so low.
• Minute to Win It is a prime example of this trope. The first few levels are usually simple, but once you hit around Level 6, they truly start getting Nintendo Hard (try bouncing six marbles into tiny thimbles, or keeping three marbles on a slanted table with the back of a spoon for a full minute, or using a chopstick in one hand to make a stable tower of ten metal nuts on a wooden board in the other hand). But the real head of the beast is Supercoin, the Million Dollar game. You have to bounce a quarter off of a table into a water jug 15 feet away, with the hole being a mere 1.75 inches wide (barely larger than the quarter itself). Needless to say, it's basically a Luck-Based Mission, and of the eight people who have tried it (only one of whom got there the "legitimate" way, mind you), all have failed.
  • It's getting so bad that now the audience even groans upon hearing the game's name. That's how stupidly hard it is.
• The Price Is Right post-Roger Dobkowitz (season 37-present) has been accused by longtime fans of being Nintendo Hard - from brutal pricing game setups to impossible to bid showcases, especially killing Double Showcase Winners. On the week of January 11-15, 2010, only three games were won.
  • To cite an individual game that's Nintendo Hard, look no further than the early game Bullseye (not to be confused with a much easier later game that shares the same name). The contestant had to use binary search ("higher... lower...") in order to zero in on the price of a car, similar to today's Clock Game. The only trouble was, rather than making as many guesses as they could within a given time limit (as is done with Clock Game), the contestant only had seven guesses period. To figure out the exact price of a four-digit car down to the dollar. The game was retired after less than two months, with nobody ever winning it.
• UK kids Game Show Raven contains The Way Of The Warrior, an assault course played 3 times a week over each season's four week run. It's played by the contestant currently in last place, and it keeps being played until it's defeated. Over the first 8 seasons, it's been attempted 101 times, and won just four, and each time it's come back harder the next year... Not that no-one defeating it stops them upping the difficulty between seasons, it simply isn't guaranteed to be increased in difficulty unless someone beats it.
• The earlier UK kids Game Show Knightmare had a similar record- 80 teams challenged the Dungeon of Deceit over the course of 8 series. 72 of them failed. The first and third series didn't have a single winner.
• Wipeout imported the Japanese obstacle course show concept to the US... though they're nice enough to let you finish the course after you inevitably fall off the Big Balls. In fact, they play Nintendo Hardness for fun!
  • In a different vein, the unrelated UK quiz show Wipeout (also ported to the U.S. with Peter Tomarken as host), which had a fairly standard setup of picking the correct answers from the false ones, all displayed on a big screen. But picking an incorrect answer zeroed your entire winnings so far, each round continued until either all the correct answers or all the 'wipeouts' were found, and the prizes weren't much anyway. Players would usually pass after a correct answer rather than risk another one, and you'd frequently see two players going home with nothing and the third with a hundred quid or so.