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We might not have had a thread about this subject in particular, but we must have discussed similar things, like the hardest games you've finished, etc.

So, for me, the answer would be predictable. R-Type. It's been the defining experience in my past 10 or so years of gaming.

But that's not something I never believed I would do, since I stuck with it until I beat it. There have been a lot of games I beat only after on again, off again play. (Or have been playing off and on, and hope to beat in the future).

Two that particularly stand out, though, are "King's Knight" and "The Adventures of Bayou Billy". They stand out more because I only had about 10 or so games when I beat them, so there weren't a preponderance of other games to distract me. And I probably had them for at least a year before I beat them.

One day, I decided I had owned King's Knight long enough without beating it, and sat down and dedicated myself to it. I beat it really soon after that, but it still felt kind of fluke-ish.

With Bayou Billy, I somehow managed to get to the end, and that too felt fluke-ish. I beat it again to convince myself that I could do it again, but that was it for my experience with that game as a child. (I may have beaten King's Knight a couple of times then, too).

The thing is, as an adult, I got quite a bit better at those games, to the degree that beating them doesn't feel like a fluke at all. I beat Bayou Billy something like 5 times in a row (not in one sitting, but each time I attempted the game, I beat it). And I beat it without continuing.

And for a while, I thought it might have been impossible to beat the final boss if you made it to it with powerups. Gordon is much, much easier if you have powerups (the whip and the bullet proof vest), so they made the final bosses harder to compensate. I'm not aware of anything else quite like that in videogames. Anyway, they have an extra health bar if you reach them that way, and it seems like you just can't get rid of it.

Back when FO lived in New Jersey and I visited her, I played through that game there and tried to beat the bosses with the whip. They didn't seem to take damage, but I was patient and kept chipping at them, while avoiding taking damage myself. After quite a while, that extra hit point finally went away! After that, the rest of the hit points went away as fast as they normally would, so I beat the game after that. So, that solved a mystery that I wondered about for years.