History Main / SelfImposedChallenge

* ''Franchise/{{Hitman}}'' series: Players of ''VideoGame/Hitman2'', ''VideoGame/Hitman2016'' and ''VideoGame/HitmanBloodMoney'' can make their own slasher fic, where 47 just kills everyone in the level.

** One of the game's main mechanics is "Lap 2", playing through a level again after triggering the EscapeSequence (vital to getting enough points for a P Rank). Naturally, there's a mod that allows you to do a Lap ''3''. Some levels will see you finishing the third lap with barely ''one second''.

* ''VideoGame/{{Touhou}}'':

** Scoring high in the games themselves is a Self-Imposed Challenge. Scoring high in ''VideoGame/{{Touhou}}'' involves making things as dangerous as possible: grazing thousands of bullets, often using your bombs to clear away bullets, then ''suiciding'' to reset your bomb count and get even more points. A compendium of [[http://en.touhouwiki.net/wiki/High_scores world records can be found at Touhou Wiki.]] If you download the replays on the page, you will be ''astounded'' at the challenges the players put themselves through. The former world-record ''Subterranean Animism'' replay by "yukarin" is particularly notable, getting very close to maxing out the graze counter at ''97,585 graze.''

** A particular challenge that seems exclusive to ''Touhou'' is running the game at 90FPS, or 1.5x speed. Strictly speaking, it's possible to set the FPS in Touhou to any amount higher than the default 60 with the right patches, but 90 is easily the most popular, since setting the FPS much higher than 90 would result in a game that borders on unplayable, while setting it much lower wouldn't be much different from the vanilla game in many cases. An extension to the challenge is to try and time out attacks at higher FPS, resulting in videos like [[https://youtu.be/YzfdjfYpTuQ this]] -- while Virtue of Wind God itself has never even come close to being done at 90FPS, one ChallengeGamer ''did'' manage to do it at 75FPS, [[https://youtu.be/UysYo1xPGts as seen here]].

** Low Pikmin runs (also known as "Oatchi Runs" in ''VideoGame/Pikmin4''), where players attempt to get 100% completion having only sprouted the minimum amount of Pikmin: this being 50 for ''Pikmin 1'' (85 in the Japanese version), 101 in ''Pikmin 2'', and 42 in ''Pikmin 3''.

** Low Pikmin runs, where players attempt to get 100% completion having only sprouted the minimum amount of Pikmin: this being 50 for ''Pikmin 1'' (85 in the Japanese version), 101 in ''Pikmin 2'', and 42 in ''Pikmin 3''.

** ''VideoGame/Pikmin2'': It's possible to beat the game (collecting 10,000 Pokos) without ever leaving the Valley of Repose or even acquiring the Purple Pikmin. This takes a while, as eventually your only source of treasure will be mook corpses, which go for 10-15 Pokos each.

* ''TabletopGame/BattleTech'': This is the general purpose of the Clans' Trial system of combat. There's no honor in winning a battle by using overwhelming odds, so they try to use as little forces to win as possible. For example, if one Clan launches a raid on another's planet, the defender will announce what forces that they intend to commit to the protection of their resources. Then the attacker will review the record of those defenders and decide how much of their own force to commit- if the defender commits five battlemechs, the attacker may choose to use only three. Similarly, an individual pilot may choose to voluntarily avoid using one or more of their mech's weapons in a fight.

** Due to how the game is structured, each game has an absolute minimum amount of in-game days in which it can be completed: six days for ''Pikmin'', eight for ''Pikmin 2'' (seven with glitches), and ten for ''Pikmin 3''. Winning in minimum in-game time requires ''intense'' micromanagement, glitch exploitation, and planning, but it's been done in all three games, and it's often done concurrently with a zero-death run, since even a single death can ruin everything.
** ''VideoGame/Pikmin2001'': It's possible to complete the game without ever getting Blue Pikmin, though you still do need to use them in some sense -- there's a flower that allows you to transform a handful of pikmin into blues, but they only appear at very rare points in the game.

* ''VideoGame/EarthBound'':
** The game has numerous [[RandomlyDrops 1-in-128 items]]. These range from items you can't find in stores (such as the Sword of Kings and the Xterminator Spray) to items you can get well before stores ''stock'' them. Numerous fan quests have arisen as gamers try to get every one of them.

*** The Straight Sword Hilt Only run;

** ''[[VideoGame/TheLegendOfZeldaBreathOfTheWild Breath of the Wild]]'' is so open-ended, it's spawned many ideas for challenge runs. These include:

* ''VideoGame/{{Hitman}}'' series: Players of ''VideoGame/Hitman2'', ''VideoGame/Hitman2016'' and ''VideoGame/HitmanBloodMoney'' can make their own slasher fic, where 47 just kills everyone in the level.

** Youtuber [[https://www.youtube.com/c/Skurry/featured Skurry]] likes to come up with 'meme categories', which he then attempts to speedrun. Notable examples:

** ''VideoGame/ShinMegamiTenseiIIINocturne'' has the Solo Hard "True Demon Ending" mode challenge, which consists of starting the game on Hard mode, playing only with the main character, and going the "True Demon Ending" path, which requires you to [[spoiler:finish the [[BonusDungeon Labyrinth of]] [[ThatOneLevel Amala]], and then fight the BonusBoss ''right after fighting the FinalBoss'']]. Since in this game you can only have eight skills at a time, and you can never relearn skills once forgotten, it consists of planning your skills for each single boss and dungeon before even starting the game.

* In ''VideoGame/{{Fallout 3}}'', a common challenge is using the "paralysing palm" perk and V.A.T.S ([[FunWithAcronyms Vault-tec assisted targeting system]]) to create a GoodOldFisticuffs-only character.
* ''VideoGame/FalloutNewVegas'', with the addition of Hardcore Mode (ammo has weight, players must eat, drink, and sleep, stimpaks only heal over time, companions can die and crippled limbs can only be healed with a doctor's bag or the addictive drug Hydra), allows for its own inbuilt challenge. Many players have chosen to up the ante by restricting themselves to realistic carry weights (in the realm of 50 to 100 units of gear maximum) and sometimes realistic carry methods (such as only having one or two longarms and two one-handed firearms, and not carrying anything that couldn't reasonably fit in a rucksack). PC gamers, with access to mods, can increase this even more: realistic damage and armor values that make armor much more valuable and allow for the player and enemies to be taken down in a single good shot, purchasable backpacks for an in-game increase in carry weight, mods that add weight to all items (even money!), and even a hideously complex needs system that requires players to keep track of proper protein and nutrition intake as well as calories and hydration, follow their circadian rhythm and get the right amount of sleep at the right time of the day, and keep track of their levels of stimulants and alcohol in their system; it's even possible to suffer water intoxication from drinking too fast, or to put yourself in a "food coma" from overeating.

*** Beating [[BonusBoss Emerald Weapon and Ruby Weapon]] without items, materia, or using a LimitBreak, meaning you can only use physical attacks;

* ''VideoGame/DissidiaFinalFantasy'': So, you can beat [[ThatOneBoss That One]] [[SNKBoss SNK]] BonusBoss, Feral Chaos. Can you beat him [[NoDamageRun without taking damage]]? Without using [[AssistCharacter assists]]? Without a summon, and without EXP to HP/EX/BRV/AST? Using ''Gabranth''? [[https://youtu.be/VyYnpe3ulDg Because this guy can]].

* In one episode of ''Anime/{{Pokemon}}'', a trainer named Miki specifically asks that Brock and Ash use Fire Type Pokémon to battle her Skarmory, a Steel Type, which creates a serious type disadvantage. She feels that such battles make her Pokémon tougher.

* ''Franchise/{{Superman}}'':

** Beating the FinalBoss ''without'' using the Fierce Deity Mask.

** The [[https://www.ssbwiki.com/Bowser_Challenge "Bowser Challenge"]] requires you to play a one-on-three 4-stock ''Melee'' match against three CPU Bowser players, on the Fountain of Dreams stage, with team attack turned off (''i.e.'' no damage from FriendlyFire). Fountain of Dreams is the smallest competitive stage, and the opponent Bowsers -- already the [[MightyGlacier largest and most powerful]] character in the game -- now don't have to worry about their slow speed either. It's so hard, no competitive fighter has been documented completing a legit Bowser Challenge.

** XKCD inspired a challenge on Wiki/{{Wikipedia}}, where you can go to any article, read it until you reach a link to another page, click on it, and repeat the process until you get to the page on "Philosophy". It happens surprisingly quickly.

* ''Fantastic Contraption'', a Flash-based physics-puzzle game, lends itself well to this. Players will try to complete the goal with as few pieces as possible, or without using certain kinds (gravity power, no catapults, ''etc.''). The fact that you can save and share your contraptions for others to watch in action helps quite a bit.

* ''VideoGame/FreeCell'': The most obvious one is reducing the number of free cells, sometimes even to zero (which is possible in 69 out of the original Microsoft 32,000). Some software implementations will have this as an option. Another is to make the biggest "flourish" you can, referring to the process of the cards automatically going to the home row at the end of the game -- in a few games, it's possible to set up a 52-card flourish, taking the home row from empty to full in one move flat.
* In ''VideoGame/{{Portal 2}}'', it's possible to complete a lot of co-op chambers without any help from a partner (as in they don't place a portal or interact with anything), and very few of them require glitches. Finding a partner who will let you do this is a problem, though.