Unwinnable - Television Tropes & Idioms

"Ethel! I-I think we're fighting a losing game!"

— Lucy, I Love Lucy

"Oops, I stepped on an ant. Better restart the game."

— Peter Fox, playing Moral Guardian approved Video Game Nice City.

Unwinnable is a gameplay state in which it is impossible for the player to finish the game. The only options are to reload a previous save (if possible) or start the game anew.

Unwinnable situations are generally the result of either a game-breaking glitch or design oversight, such as a required Scripted Event failing to activate or the good ol' failure of collision detection followed by falling off the planet. Saved games may also be made immediately before imminent death or with too little health to survive the current predicament. Making every save viable requires building the game around it

and is not always feasible. Games with save-anywhere systems are particularly susceptible, as emulator users with save states often find out.

Many games urge you to keep and continually update multiple save files should you encounter an unwinnable situation. Autosaves and automated reloads have become more extensive, while save points now tend to heal. Unwinnability is shunned across the board.

Games with poorly placed autosave points can often save the player's position in unwinnable situations, e.g. with too little health or ammo to survive a battle after the Point Of No Return (i.e. you either can't backtrack to pick up ammo, or it disappears from the previous areas). Even worse, they often don't allow you to keep multiple saves, so you are totally screwed over and have to restart the level/mission.

The great exception are Adventure Games, especially Interactive Fiction. These were originally rife with intentionally unwinnable situations, which became a tradition before waning because players still couldn't stand them. An unsolicited theory is that, in comparison to the kill/duck/get/use mechanics of the average game, adventures have effectively been virtual worlds. Colossal Cave Adventure obeyed written commands several years before Space Invaders with its joystick and one button, Monkey Island 2 had digitized oil paintings for backgrounds back when Super Mario World was new. If in your exploration you happened to miss or destroy a vital clue, that was a pity but par the course.

The great Adventure Game companies had the same attitudes to unwinnable situations as they had to sudden character death. Sierra loved them, courted them, became one with them. Lucas Arts rejected them entirely and went off to do something fun instead. The Interactive Fiction producer Infocom was all over the map in its long existence.

Zarf's Cruelty Scale of Interactive Fiction, as lifted (and revised) from here

, here

and here

, divides video game types as follows:

Merciful:

You only ever need one save file, and that only if you want to turn the computer off and go to sleep. You never need to restore to an earlier game.
Say that there is a large button on the wall, with a sign above it that says 'Inorganic Vaporizer Ray'. When you try to push it, the game says something like 'You'd better not. You'd lose that nifty pocket screwdriver'.

Polite:

You only need one save game, because if you do something fatally wrong, it's blatantly obvious and you'll know better than to save afterwards.
There is a large button on the wall, with a sign above it that says 'Inorganic Vaporizer Ray'. When you push it, all your stuff gets vaporized, including your clothing, and you catch a draft and die of pneumonia.

Tough:

There are things you can do which you'll have to save before doing. But you'll think "Ah, I'd better save before I do this."
There is a large button on the wall, with a sign above it that says 'Inorganic Vaporizer Ray'. When you push it, all your stuff gets vaporized, and you can't finish the game.

Nasty:

There are things you can do which you'll have to save before doing. After you do one, you'll think "Oh, bugger, I should have saved before I did that."
The same as Tough, only there's no sign.

Cruel:

You think "I should have saved back in the third room. Now I'll have to start over."
The same as Nasty, only you just hear a humming noise when you push the button. Then, fifty turns later, you type 'inventory'... "Hey, where's all my stuff?"

Note that dipping below "polite" is a design flaw in most games. Old-fashioned adventure games and most Sierra games seldom rise above "nasty."

Make this a Guide Dang It, and you're certain to piss a lot of people off.

The spiritual opposite of a Hopeless Boss Fight, where you are supposed to fail to make the game continue. Also (in some cases) the worst-case scenario of Lost Forever. Contrast Kobayashi Mario, for games not supposed to be "won" at all: Games that have a High Scores screen instead of a victory condition.

Examples

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Sierra

Sierra Sierra Sierra Sierra Sierra SIERRA SIERRA SIERRA SIERRA ARARARRRGGGH !!!!!
- In Kings Quest I, if you lose any of the three treasures (e.g., have the magic mirror stolen by the dwarf), the game is unwinnable.
  - Luckily, in AGS' remake of "King's Quest 1, you can play a no-deadends mode.
- In Kings Quest II, there is a bridge you must cross (several times) over the chasm, and making just one extra trip across makes the game unwinnable - it will break before you can get the three magic doors opened. It's not the clearest unwinnable point by far.
  - Space Quest I has another bridge. Freddie Pharkas, Frontier Pharmacist has the bridge out of town - every time you cross it, a piece falls off and you're told you have three crossings left. (The bridge will never actually fall.)
- In Kings Quest III, the game is run on an internal timer, and if you aren't in the right place when an event happens, you're stuck and the game is unwinnable. Usually there aren't any warnings that there's a time limit for certain things either... a notable example is that after you get the amber stone from the oracle, the pirate ship in the harbor will only be there for twenty minutes. Then it will leave, forever, taking your only chance to get to Daventry with it. Although, if you're desperate, you can always try the random teleporting stone and hope you get lucky and end up there...
- In Kings Quest IV, you're given two love arrows. They're the only ones you can get in the game. One is for the unicorn, and the other for Lolotte. However, if you shoot the unicorn with one arrow too close to the edge of the screen and then accidentally walk off the side, the arrow wears off, meaning that the unicorn will again run away from you if you get back on the screen, therefore rendering it unattainable without wasting the other arrow you need to kill Lolotte. Thanks Sierra. Thanks.
- In Kings Quest V, the player has to feed a starving eagle. However, if you give the eagle the pie, you can't use it to fight off a yeti later on. You're also screwed if you eat the pie yourself when you're starving.
  - Then there's the time you have to save a talking rat from a cat. You get one try to save the rat, and if you don't, the game is unwinnable. Saving the rat requires a boot, (or a stick, but odds are, you've already used the stick) and the boot is in the middle of the vast, trackless desert, making it VERY easy to miss.The rat only appears if you have the means to save it, but you only have a few seconds to react...
  - And don't even think about going into the dark forest without the bottle, the amulet, and the honeycomb. Not that you would ever know that you'll need those items... and only those items...
- In Kings Quest VI, the player has to venture into the underworld. Upon arrival, he can simply walk through the gates. What he needs to do first is play a bone xylophone in order to get a key that will open a chest containing a letter that he shows to a guard to keep the guard from killing him just before the final scene.
  - In addition, at one point Alexander is thrown into a labyrinth and has to find his way out again. This requires certain inventory items, and it's possible to enter the labyrinth without them. If you do, you can never escape. Better yet, there's no indication of which items you need until you've already entered the maze, meaning anybody who didn't use a guide was banking on pure luck to avoid a restart there.
  - The game is actually a bit merciful in this regard. If you don't have the required items when this particular point arrives, then you'll be given time "to prepare", at which point you head back, hopeful that you have everything. If you have everything you need, then you'll simply be taken directly to the labyrinth.
- The original Space Quest gave you the chance to sell a hovercraft for money, which you will need. If you refuse, the would-be buyer will come back and offer to throw in a jetpack as well. If you take his first (jetpack-less) offer, a few hours of play later you will find yourself in a situation where you need a jetpack, have no way to get one (or do much of anything besides float in space), and have no idea where you missed the chance to pick one up, Guide Dang It...
- Space Quest II. Late in the game the PC can get kissed by an Alien ripoff without anything happening. However, once you're nearing the end of the game and after having saved over anything before the kissing incident, a baby alien bursts from your character's chest, killing him. The game does point out that you probably don't want to get kissed by that thing.
  - It is, however, possible to complete the game before the baby alien kills you (it works on a timer). No mention will be made of this.
- Space Quest III avoided the Unwinnable scenarios, but they were back with a vengeance in IV. Forget to write down the time code for SQXII at the start of the game? Well, too bad, in the floppy version (but mercifully not the CD remake) the code is randomized so you can't even look it up. Plenty of plot-crucial items can also be Lost Forever. And there are Guide Dang It puzzles again.
  - Due to a spot of bad programming, a timer at the end of Space Quest IV runs based on hardware speed. Nowadays it can take less than a second.
- Space Quest V had a particularly nasty scenario where, after crawling through a complex and stressful series of mazes on the enemy battleship, you confront the Big Bad and realize you're missing a single item...which you needed to pick up around an hour ago, and hand to your engineer well before you entered the ship in the first place.
- Screw up in making the Dispel Potion in Quest For Glory 1 (with items like the Magic Acorn, which can be Lost Forever), and the game is unwinnable.
  - Or if you piss off the Healer by stealing from her, with no mention at the time that she'll know what you've done. Did we mention that one of the "hero" classes is the thief?
  - In Quest For Glory 2, dropping important items like the mirror and magic lamp would get you stuck later. The latter actually triggers a unique Easter Egg death.
  - As does dropping the spare clothes when you go to Raseir. Let's just say the Hero looks good in a veil.
  - To be fair, if you purposefully do things like dropping important items or eating a certain acorn just because you wanted to see what happened, you deserve to lose. And yes, this troper has done all of these things.
- In Leisure Suit Larry 1, if you don't have enough money for cab fare (under about $10) and aren't at the casino, the game is unwinnable.
- Leisure Suit Larry 2 is linear, from Los Angeles to the cruise ship to the resort island and the like - there's no turning back. Forgeting just one item before you get to the next segment makes the game unwinnable. The same thing happens all over again when you need to board an airplane later in the game.
- Leisure Suit Larry 3 is equally ridiculous - there is a point where you play Passionate Patti, and forgetting even an insignificant piece of attire makes the game unwinnable. (Women have more clothing than you think.)
- In fact, it was so bad that Sierra game developer Al Lowe averted this trope in Leisure Suit Larry 5: There is never an "unwinnable" point in the game, no matter how much you mess up. (You can't die in this game, either - another interesting inversion!). Still... if you forget to write down the numbers to the various cab companies you must call throughout the game, the single time they're shown in each location, you're pretty much still up Unwinnable creek without a paddle.
- Laura Bow 2: The Dagger of Amon Ra is a potentially Nightmare Fuel murder mystery adventure game that loves nothing more than letting you progress to the next chapter without finding every clue you were supposed to find in the previous one. Congratulations, you found a body. Did you remember to look behind the casket, check all seven pockets on the body, and look at that one hair on the shirt with the magnifying glass, in that order? No? Aww....
  - Technically, this sort of situation only locks you out of the good ending, in which Laura isn't murdered in her sleep. A better example is during the chase sequence, when you need to give someone back their discarded boot. The boot is in an earlier room, not at all conspicuous, and doesn't appear UNTIL the timed chase sequence, at which point you're more concerned with not getting killed than collecting yet more inventory items.
- In Mixed-Up Mother Goose, the door to Jack Sprat's house closes after you return his platter to him. If there's still an item on the table inside, you're stuck. (And this game was for very small children.)
- Also? It doesn't count, but we're still mentioning the fact that 1980s text-controlled games may follow written commands but don't have much in the way of vocabulary. It may not be programmed into the gameplay, but you may still have to be a Tolkien-like linguistics genius who could come up with 15 different iterations of the phrase "use plunger on wall" because the game would accept a single variant as the right one and anything else would earn you a lethal acid bath.
- While later Sierra games tried to avoid unwinnable situations, many contained game-stopping bugs that caused such. For example, at least one version of Daryl Gates' Police Quest: Open Season had a game breaking bug or programming oversight where if you failed to show the bone to SID on Day 3 before you gave it to the coroner, the final scene of the day with the reporters at the morgue would fail to happen, making the game Unwinnable. Other Game Breaking Bugs could cause the game to crash on the map screen at the beginning of a day(would happen every time with the saved game).
- Police Quest III had the "endless highway" glitch, where if you stopped a speeder or other criminal on the freeway near the "end of your jurisdiction", instead of turning around afterwards, you would get stuck in an infinite stream of stoplights. Hope you have an extra saved game.
- Even games designed for children weren't exempt from this trope, as evidenced in Eco Quest. Forget to grab the flask of oil-dissolving bacteria? Too bad. Guess you have to start again from the very first scene.
- Conquest of Camelot has a really bad one. If you failed to rescue any of the three knights, then Arthur has sin burdening him. Might not seem so bad except that once you get the Holy Grail, you'll receive some triumphant victory music...and then you're suddenly shocked into dust because you didn't save Gawaine, Launcelot, and Galahad and are therefore deemed unworthy.
- Conquests of the Longbow was fairly merciful; you could screw up to the point of losing the treasure you were supposed to capture or letting a major NPC die, and you'd just get a Bad Ending. However, on the second day you're supposed to get a slipper from Marian, who's under attack by a Fens Monk. You can either kill the attacker, at which point she'll give you the slipper as a reward, or let her die and then take the slipper from her corpse. If she died, then you'll also die the next day when you go to deliver the slipper.
- Averted, curiously enough, in Sierra's American history game, Pepper's Adventures in Time. Herbs to cure gout found in Act 1 in the shack when Pepper and Lockjaw are locked up upon arriving in the past are needed for Benjamin Franklin at the Constitutional Convention in Act 5. If the player missed this or is starting the game from Act 5, extra herbs can be found underneath a few pieces of paper on Ben's desk in the Constitional Convention.
  - I guess Sierra didn't have the heart to make a game intended for educating elementary schoolers unwinnable. ...Well...one of them anyway. (*cough* Eco Quest *cough* Mixed-Up Mother Goose *cough*).

Close Sierra

Adventure Games

The text adventure based on The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy contained some deliberate, devilish cases of obscure things that needed to be done within a certain time frame. For instance, at the end of the game, Marvin will ask you for a specific tool to repair the ship with. The tool required is randomly selected from a pool of eight or ten, and if you don't have one of them, the game will choose that one. So, if you left the toothbrush in your bedroom at the beginning of the game, you'll be forced to start over completely.
- And if you miss your appointment with Marvin by failing to work out how to get into the niche in exactly twelve turns? Also stuck.
- Even more infamous is the notorious "Babel Fish Dispenser" puzzle, wherein the player must use a pile of junk mail picked up at his doorstep back on Earth. At this point, however, the junk mail has already been blown up along with the rest of the planet Earth, forcing players who forgot the junk mail (which is likely, since if they take too long trying to pick things up, they'll be flattened by a bulldozer) to restart their games for any chance of a satisfactory ending. The number of babel fish in the vending machine is one less than the number of steps necessary to get one safely out of it - in other words, if you're going through fixing the things that go wrong one at a time, by the time you have the full solution the machine will be empty. (As the hint book puts it: "At this point, brave men have been known to break down and cry.")
- Most infamous of all is the cheese sandwich puzzle, in which failing to feed a random stray dog early in the game while you're rushing urgently on a timer will cause the game to be Un Winnable much, much later. You actually got a second chance at that puzzle (you relive that portion of the game as Ford and can have him do it), but there's no clue to do it then either.
- Likewise, the Spellcasting X01 series of games (supposedly made at least in part by the same people) was phenomenally restrictive in terms of what you had to do and when you had to do it; if a day passed by without one tiny little thing being taken care of, the game became unwinnable.
- Leaked design notes for the unfinished Hitchhiker's Guide 2 game suggest including a puzzle whose solution causes the game to become essentially Unwinnable (ignoring a one-in-a-million random chance). Only by not solving the puzzle and losing the points could the player have won the game. This is just how the people at Infocom used to think.
These turned up frequently in other Infocom adventures. In Zork Zero, for example, the player must cast a spell on an item and then has exactly 18 turns to use the item before it changes back. Once it is restored, the item cannot be transformed again.
Averted in Golden Sun The Lost Age where nearly every puzzle requires a certain power to complete, many of which are given through equitable trinkets. One town has a party member temporarily leave the group to have some time to himself. To progress through the story you need to use a particular ability to tie a rope up to the roof of a building because the owner's door is stuck. If you give the item that teaches this ability to the member that left, the owner will berate you for coming so far in your adventure only to be stuck there and then lower a rope down for you.
Dracula Unleashed was an FMV video game that was also part adventure. There are numerous times where you can make the game unwinnable...a few of them are annoyingly Guide Dang It moments. One requires you to go to a bookstore late at night so you know there is a secret passage there...don't go there? Then you don't know that there is a clue you can look for. And if you go into the Asylum unprepared, then Hellsing is strangled in front of you and you can do nothing more but wait for a Game Over.
Averted in pretty much every Lucasarts adventure game after Zak Mc Kracken And The Alien Mindbenders, which always allow the player to go back and collect items that they need, or refuse to let them continue without the required item. This was often viewed as "dumbing down adventure games for the masses" by hardcore Sierra enthusiasts, whereas Lucasarts themselves believed that players should not be punished for experimenting in their games.
- You can make Monkey Island unwinnable if you really try, such as by dropping several hundred coins into a broken grog machine or staying underwater for more than ten minutes (with an insultingly simple puzzle being the only thing preventing you from leaving).
  - If you do die on this puzzle, your commands are changed to 'float', 'bloat', 'bob' and 'order hint book'. The last gives you the Lucasarts helpline phone number if you use it.
- The Lucasarts Game Development Philosophy is referenced in The Curse of Monkey Island, where Guybrush Threepwood enters a state of faux death and a pair of side characters remark how they thought "you couldn't die in Lucasarts games" and that the developers must be "trying something different".
- Aaaaaaaah! Radioactive steam!
Rise Of The Dragon can be very Guide Dang It since there are plenty of ways of getting permanently stuck, like locking yourself out of your home (although in this one case, there is a way to recover), leaving vital items lying around somewhere (thus losing them forever), picking the wrong dialog option and thus permanently pissing off a vital character (specially your girlfriend. Women can be so sensitive...) or letting important events go by completely unnoticed just because you weren't in the right place at the right time. In some cases though, the game will inform you when you've screwed up (or are about to) so you don't hang around wondering what went wrong.
- Heart Of China, by the same designer, also suffers from this. Sierra seems to have a thing for bastard designers.
Darkseed, which featured art by H R Giger, thrives on this. The game has a rather specific solution, complete with many chances to screw up before the end. For example, you only have enough money to buy two items at the store, there are many items available, and you're going to need to buy the right two to win... and you can't even buy them at the same time. For another example, you need to set up an alternate way to enter your house before you ever learn that the main way will be blocked later. Also, you're playing in "real time", and you need to be in the right place at the right time for certain events. Essentially, the game expects you to keep starting over from the beginning until you get it right.
- Or the fact that you need to get put in jail at ONE point in the game, with three specific items you need to put in your cell for later to finish the game. The sequel didn't change anything. If you die, you're told you can't die because of your importance. However, you only get this once, and to finish the game you need to die at a CERTAIN time, so if you die and think you're in the safe before then, tough luck.
- To see exactly how bad it is, check out this playthrough by Slowbeef.
The Access game Amazon: Guardians of Eden is unbelievably sadistic about unwinnable puzzles, to the point of being almost unplayable without a walkthrough. Almost every decision in every chapter would make the game unbeatable if you got it wrong (if you didn't just die outright), and it frequently would recall items back as far as three chapters (and of course, once you're in a new chapter you can't go back) for an obtuse, difficult puzzle. Forgot to pick up the gasoline in the airport in Chapter Three? Too bad, you can't make a molotov cocktail in Chapter Seven, and your save is worthless now! Given that each chapter was extremely difficult and somewhat luck-based since a lot of the puzzles also happened to be of the timed variety, interspersed with random, difficult arcade sequences, loading a game and going back through one or two frustrating chapters you just beat because you forgot a lighter is not nearly as easy as it is in other franchises. Have fun.
Infocom's Enchanter text-adventure might have the quickest-to-unwinnable-state of them all. The first command of the game can be FROTZ ME, magicizing the player character into a light source instead of an object and making it impossible to drop the light and find the correct portrait in the picture gallery.
- In practice there's the ridiculously helpful bug that EXTINGUISH ME works. FROTZ originally used the same code as the command to LIGHT or EXTINGUISH a normal light source like a lamp or a torch. It wasn't originally intended that you could somehow "turn off" a glowing object (such as yourself) that had had a magical light spell cast on it. When they corrected this "error" in a later version, all of a sudden a very common player trick for making sure you were never deprived of a light source became instant unwinnability. They eventually decided they were better off changing it back, even though the text you get from EXTINGUISH SELF is rather nonsensical.
- You see this problem crop up in later games. SORCERER, the sequel, makes it a firm rule that FROTZed objects can never be EXTINGUISHed, thus always allowing you to make the game unwinnable on the first move. The final game in the trilogy, SPELLBREAKER, goes 180 degrees on this and explicitly allows you to EXTINGUISH FROTZed objects (with the message "You dismiss the magical glow, and it fades"). Of course, in that game there's hardly any point in doing so.
- Also in Enchanter, the Kulcad scroll can only be used once and cancels magic. Since every puzzle you encounter is basically a magical trap, the spell allows you to "cheat" your way past any puzzle in the game, and doing this gives no warning that you've done anything wrong. Until you get to the end game and lack the spell you need to win...
Infocom's Suspended can be unwinnable before the first normal command (not counting system commands like save/restore). Setting "Impossible" difficulty does just that - now the player's Sun is due to go nova in a few minutes, so there's not much point trying to find the right-length wire to fix the complex's systems, is there? Infocom was the best.
In Below the Root, the player must raise his or her "spirit limit" to gain various magical powers. The final skill (the ability to "kiniport" or teleport oneself anywhere on the current screen) is required to finish the game. However, if you kill any animals or people in the game, your spirit limit drops, possibly causing the game to become unwinnable.
During Lute's game on Saga Frontier, It's entirely possible to get to the last dungeon without training at all, but if you save there, there's no turning back.
- The very first Sa Ga game AKA Final Fantasy Legend had several such dungeons, and only one save slot.
The Wii version of the recent Tomb Raider Underworld had a glitch where exploring a watery passage without exploring down the hallway first would cause a switch later in the area to fail to spawn. Naturally, you needed the switch to open a door, and without it, you're trapped forever.
Infocom's only console game, the NES adventure game Tombs & Treasure, succeeded in playing like its PC cousins a bit too well. Besides one intentional example of this (Where the game tells you "This is it, Game Over, hit reset!"...VERY annoying, given the game uses incredibly long passwords as opposed to a battery backup to save your progress.), there are a couple other places where combining items in the wrong order, or forgetting an item, makes the game unwinnable.
The Game Boy Advance remake of the original Broken Sword had a couple of these owing to Game Breaking Bugs. If you go to Spain before going to Syria, it often causes a glitch whereby you cannot go to Syria at all. Also, there is a part early on where you have to make a plaster cast, but a glitch means you can do that without having picked up the plaster, which you need to get a key later in the game.
- In Broken Sword 2: The Smoking Mirror you can only get to a certain path on an island by shooting a pig with a dart, which then charges you down. If you grab a branch at just the right moment you can jump out of the way, and it'll charge through the undergrowth and open up a new path - the one you'll need later to find your way off the island - but if you don't, it just knocks you down and you get up and dust yourself off... and eventually realise you're lost in the jungle forever. Add to this that that particular island is arbitrarily lethal and forces you to save quite a lot...
- Another unwinnable situation occurs near the end of Broken Sword 2. There is a point where you need to get an elevator to work so you can travel to the top of a pyramid and grab some ammunition to set on fire with a torch down below. However, you can only pick up the torch BEFORE fixing the elevator. If you wait until you already have the ammo, your character will see "no reason" to carry around a torch, and you will have no idea that the torch was ever able to be manipulated.
The horror RPG/adventure game Elvira 2 - Jaws of Cerberus can easily become unwinnable - destroy a vital item (such as by using it up for a spell, or for the wrong spell), fail to get poison from the mad scientist (you only get one try; after talking to him the first time, he'll throw you out of his lab and lock the door), get locked up in a cold storage without means to get out, annoy a vital character ... In addition, entering the wrong room without appropriate protection may result in your death (and you have no idea about the danger until after you die).
- And here's a nice one, the plot-important items aren't protected, so step on a fireball trap? Good-bye spell book!
- Heck, Elvira 2 is pretty much Made Of Unwin. One of the worst instances: at one point, you need to animate a Frankensteins Monster so that it moves away from a door that it obstructs. However, should you click on the monster's head beforehand, you'll automatically cut off the wires connected to its head, therefore making it impossible to animate. The worst thing is, the game never tells that you have cut the wires, and of course there are no hints at all that clicking on the head would have any ill effect.
In Jigsaw, you must collect all sixteen jigsaw pieces to restore history in each time period. While there's a device that tells you if there are jigsaw pieces in your current time period that you haven't found yet, it's sometimes very easy to make collecting them impossible, especially when you don't even realize that a piece was in an area that later becomes inaccessible. Just one example of this is the jigsaw pieces you're supposed to pick up during the mission in "Siberia" - fail to press the right button in the missile before it flies out or fail to get back the cable you used to get down to the missile to use it again on the goose's nest, and at least one of these pieces will be Lost Forever. About the most egregious Unwinnable situation, however, involves the drawing competition at the end of the game. If you haven't drawn at least 4 animals in the sketchbook over the course of the game, you can't get the competition prize you need to complete the game. Oh, you didn't get the sketchbook from inside the stool, or the pencil under the stool, before all the historical intrigue began? Better restart.
In Discworld, when you travel back in time, you have to put a frog in your mouth and then catch a butterfly. If you do it the other way around, you're trapped in last night forever.
There is a text-based online adventure game in which you met a cat at the very beginning. The entire outcome of the game depended on what you did with this cat; do the wrong thing and you'd lost. However, those who lost this way got little sympathy - they'd typed 'kill cat' rather than 'stroke cat'.
In Hotel Dusk: Room 215 it is possible to break the game fairly early on. In chapter 2 if you leave the front office with the Small Red Box you are tasked to find before you investigate EVERYTHING within that room. It doesn't help that you can also get an easy Game Over in the same room.
Kemco's NES version of Deja Vu had a mugger which, if handled incorrectly, could beat you up and leave with all your coins. It wouldn't be so bad except you need the coins to get in a taxi so you can get to different locations.
- This isn't actually completely game-breaking outright: if you get out of the cab without paying, one (if not both) of the cab drivers will sympathize with you and let you ride for free. Just once, though...
In Pokemon it is possible to exit the S.S. Anne, where you get the HM cut, required to progress in the game, and have it sail off, thus making the HM cut impossible to obtain. Additionally, at one point in the third generation games you need 50 yen to get into a museum, if you have no money at that point and have battled all the trainers along the way who would give ou money for beating them, you're stuck.
While the game itself in Guild Wars cannot be made unwinnable, some missions and quests are made Unwinnable by bugs or accidents on the players behalf.
- A mission relatively early into Prophecies can be made unwinnable when the wrong boss spawns at one spot. If the Monk boss spawns right next to a group of mobs, then you'd best get ready for a wipe...you can't kill the monk or even the other monk mob because they just won't die unless you happen to have been getting ran through!
- Several times it's possible to aggro everything in the instance. Warriors/Monks got a bad reputation for this.
- A bug in Vizunah Square would cause Mhenlo and Togo to stop dead in their tracks. This meant that when they couldn't move, you can't complete the mission.
- Another bug would make the final mission in Nightfall unwinnable! You have to kill Titans to be able to damage the final boss's health, but a bug would make them not stop spawning, leading to an eventual party wipe.
For many older RP Gs that allowed you to save anywhere, if you saved in the wrong spot then you can't win. Sa Ga games were notorious at it.
The games of Magnetic Scrolls tended to be hideously prone to Unwinnable situations, requiring precise courses of action in order to success, and they really signify a lot of tropes—Trial And Error GamePlay, Timed Missions, Guide Dang It, Lost Forever, Point Of No Return, How Should I Know?, and then some. Examples:
- Fish! required that you commit near an exact path through the game, requiring more guesswork than skill. And even if you worked it out, it's distinctly possible to lose because of a time limit no one told you existed!
- In Conspiracy, you must be in several right places at several right times, a series of events must be completed in specific order, and you must manage to avoid a set of pitfalls you don't know exist, even after you lose. Failure to work things out properly results in everything from long-term imprisonment to your sudden an inexplicable death. And let's not discuss The Hospital, where over fifty moves must be done in perfect and precise order without a single indication of what they are.
- Guild of Thieves had puzzles so mind-breaking and deliriously insane that even walkthroughs don't always help. It is easily possible to completely destroy your ability to get through the game with one wrong command, and there's hundreds of wrong commands. Famously, opening a bag you've just found instantly destroys the ancient sheet music you didn't know was in there.
- Wonderland epitomizes the trope very early on: if you fail to properly take a set of breadcrumbs near the beginning, they fall away and are lost; hours into your journey you'll be completely trapped with no hope of success. And it gets worse from there.

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Card Games

Gamebooks

In the adventure book series Lone Wolf, in the second book there is a magic spear that can be missed. It is the only weapon you get that can kill Hellghasts, of which you WILL encounter at least two. Even if you get it, there is an opportunity to give it to an ally so that he can survive guarding the mouth of a cave and allow you to continue. Sure enough, later on, if you did the right thing and gave it to him... you made the book Unwinnable. He never shows back up, but you are forced to face a Hellghast, which proceeds to kill you, since you lack any weapon that can harm it.
- A second example is a few books later. God Kai help you if you begin with that book, as unless you get CS-increasing armor, a high CS, the CS-increasing potion, Kai skills including Psi-blast and Weaponskill, the weapon you gain an advantage with using Weaponskill, and a string of 0s and 9s for the three (or four depending on how you interpret the text) turns you get in the final battle, you're pretty much SOL.
- A third example of near-Unwinnability comes in book 11. If you played through the books and brought the Sommerswerd to Book 10 (implicitly forcing you to retain it for 11, as Lone Wolf is unable to do much of anything at the end of book 10, and storage is many, many miles away), you're forced to fight three boss battles near consecutively, without getting the chance to get the special weapon or restoration flask. The special weapon actually damages the boss you get to fight with it even more than the solar blade, and it even starts out weaker. The flask is a high-level restoration item, albeit a one-use object. The few bits you get with the Healing power between the battles are pretty small, as well.
The Choose your own adventure book Goosebumps: Escape from the Carnival of Terrors would be unwinnable, instead of being a game-over it would cause you to repeatedly jump back and forth between two pages forever to simulate the player being trapped inside a hall of mirrors.
- Another one about a Cave Spirit involved far more than remembering stories. In fact you actually had to select which weapons or spells your character would be armed with. The hunters path was always the hardest because your weapons had finite ammo or durability and in fact if you had used the wrong weapon at the time or didn't even PICK the right weapon to use at a certain obstacle, then the game would be unwinnable.
Ridiculousy common in Fighting Fantasy books. Sometimes it's merciful, such as giving you a message telling you that you need to find "the man of numbers, or his book" or you'll fail, thus setting you looking for those things, but other times the thing you need to progress is something totally arbitrary.

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Live Action TV

Though not always consistent, the children's game show Legends of the Hidden Temple had an end game that can become unwinnable depending on certain situations. First, there were the Pendants of Life, needed to get past three Temple Guards that will yank a contestant out of the temple during the end game if they don't have a full one, and which are rewarded in a Golden Snitch-type 1-1-2 three game system; one half pendant for the first two games, a full one for the last. Because of this, it's possible to make it to the end game with only 1 and a half or even a singular Pendant (though in the case of the former, the show gives the contestants the chance to find the other half-Pendant inside the temple), and depending on where the Temple Guards are hiding and which doors in the temple are locked, it's very possible (and has happened several times in the show's run) to be forced to encounter all three Temple Guards with only one pendant, a definite no-win situation.
- If the team is doing well enough it can also be a no-lose situation. If the team is doing well enough and gets BOTH pendants, then they cannot lose unless they were to run out of time.
Star Trek. Captains who go through the Academy have to, at least once before their Graduation, take the Unbeatable Scenario, where, no matter what they do, they will be destroyed by an Alien Encounter. James T. Kirk was the only captain to actually beat the UNBEATABLE Scenario... by honestly reprogramming the computer the night before.
- Although other officers have been described as sort-of evading simulated death by changing the mission parameters (Scotty taking advantage of a glitch in the simulation's physics, and others simply refusing to take their ship into the situation where the no-win situation happens).
- Also, by the time of The Next Generation, it's apparent that Starfleet had figured out other ways of testing this sort of thing. Troi's test involved ordering a close friend to certain death in order to save the rest of the ship and crew in a simulation. Wesley had a version of the test (which he didn't realize was one) involving being forced to leave someone behind in a deadly situation in order to save who he could.
- One of William Shatner's own continuation novels had a new character bring up to Kirk about how he was the first to beat the scenario... and then immediately and unwittingly bring him down several pegs by revealing that everyone wins the scenario nowadays. It's become a programming challenge rather than a command one.
- Star Trekker, a parody comic from Antarctic Press, subverted this by having the main character (a Japanese captain) FIRE ON the Kobiyashi Maru. Being as that the Maru was a freighter loaded with dilithium crystals, the resulting explosion crippled the nearby Klingon cruisers. The captain was ordering a followup strike to take advantage of the Klingons' momentary confusion when Admiral Kirk himself kills the simulation and walks in to dress down the captain. She, in turn, explains succinctly that as Klingons do not take prisoners and saving the vessel was a clear impossibility, priority had to be given to saving her own ship...which Kirk dismissed, but later we see that it was really more a matter of not wanting anyone else to win the simulation.
- On Deep Space Nine, O'Brien and Bashir often spend their evenings playing a simulation of the battle of the Alamo in the holosuite, with themselves taking on the role of the doomed Texas soldiers. When asked why in the world they keep playing a battle scenario that's literally impossible to win, they explain that it's such an irresistable challenge precisely because it's unwinnable.
Knightmare had a No Backtracking rule, meaning it was very possible for the teams to miss out on a vital clue or item. In a few cases, this led to an extremely hard Luck Based Mission, but usually it was only a matter of time before their mistake came back to kill them.

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Sports

Tabletop Games

Video Games

Super Metroid could be made unwinnable thusly: The Gravity Suit gives you the same effects as the Varia Suit (heat shielding) in addition to its freedom of movement in liquid environments, so one could potentially skip it by fighting Phantoon first. Most energy tank upgrades aren't necessary if you're particularly adept at avoiding damage, so it's entirely possible to save in Tourian's second save station just before Mother Brain's chamber with only a few of them. However, Mother Brain's beam does 600 damage if you only have the Gravity Suit equipped, and is reduced by half if the Varia Suit is present. So, you've saved in Tourian past the Point Of No Return with only the Gravity Suit and less than six energy tanks...
The 1984 Namco arcade game Tower of Druaga (adapted to an anime in 2008) features a hero going through a 60 level tower. Each level has a hidden treasure; some treasures are bad, and make the game unwinnable. This fact might not be discovered until many levels later; nor can the item's properties be discerned until obtained. A rare case of Guide Dang It in a arcade game. To make matters worse, some early arcade consoles had a bug simply making the last level unbeatable.
The Atari 7800 game Impossible Mission centered on gathering six pieces of a device to prevent a Mad Scientist from blowing up the world. The catch? There was a bug in the programming that made the mission literally impossible - you could not collect one of the pieces. This is a rare case where the game was unwinnable through no fault of the player.
- This is a port-specific case of Unwinnable; only the Atari 7800 version of this game contains the bug, and specifically the NTSC version. All other versions of the game, including the original Commodore 64 version, and the PAL version of the Atari 7800 port (where the bug was fixed) do not contain the bug, and are therefore winnable.
- Impossible Mission II had many ways to render the game Unwinnable, such as destroying a music safe by accidentally placing a mine instead of a time-bomb in front of it, rendering an area inaccessible with a mine hole, or running out of floor-moving or robot-disabling items in a tower, thus resulting in a music piece or passcode number being Lost Forever. Many players also often saved the game with too little time left on the clock.
In the N64 game Space Station: Silicon valley one of the game's bonus trophies was uncollectable, resulting in it being impossible to get the Hundred Percent Completion necessary to access the game's bonus level without cheating. The final level of the story was fully accessible, however.
Though not exactly an Unwinnable situation, a nasty glitch in some initial release versions of Spyro: Enter The Dragon makes it impossible to achieve Hundred Percent Completion: in the first Speedway level, if you leave the level before winning the second egg, a glitch makes that egg unreachable, even if you win the race for it later.
- Also In Spyro: Enter the Dragon, if you are playing a pirated game, then Zoe will tell you so. Afterwards, gems go missing, eggs fail to show up, thus making Hundred Percent Completion impossible.
- Grand Theft Auto IV, at least on the X Box 360, uses a more blatant method to make 100% completion unobtainable while using cheats: certain cheats will inactivate certain achievements, such as full health/armor inactivating the "Clean the Mean Streets" achievement. Also, the player will be presented with the option of either killing or sparing certain characters; killing the character will always result in 100% completion being unobtainable since that character has missions attached to him/her later on. This was by design in order to highlight the consequences of player's actions (the game's even nice enough to tell you such).
The very first Mega Man game has one of these: in Elec Man's stage, there is an item called the Magnet Beam hidden behind some blocks. A level near the end of the game is impossible to complete without this item, and there's no way to go back and get it. Even better, you have to have one of two specific weapons to get the item, so if you go through the stages in the wrong order you have to visit this stage (and fight its boss) twice.
- That is, unless you're able to take advantage of a game-breaking glitch which allows you to zip through walls and other boundaries.
  - Amusingly enough, once you gain the Magnet Beam, such zipping becomes easier to do, even allowing you to skip all the boss rematches.
In Mega Man 2, if you reach the final boss without having enough Bubble Lead (BubbleMan's weapon) energy (from using it all up against earlier enemies in Wily's fortress), fail to connect said weapon with the boss too many times, or were foolish enough to use any other weapon (which restores the boss' health!), it is impossible to win the last fight. That's not all: when you start your next life, the checkpoint where the game dumps you at has no enemies, therefore it is impossible to recharge the weapon required to win the fight. Result? Welcome to the game's Hopeless Boss Fight, where you'll have to suicide yourself for the number of lives needed for Game Over. If you reset the game in rage, you did write down that password to get back into Wily's fortress, right? Oh, and it only puts you back at the beginning of the fortress.
- Mind, that's the issue if you reset. If you just go for the Game Over and then continue, you get all your weapon energy back and start at the beginning of THAT LEVEL instead of the whole fortress.
Mega Man Battle Network 4 had Artifacts Of Doom called "Dark Chips." If Mega Man used them, they gave an incredibly powerful attack, but "darkened" his soul and reduced his maximum HP by 1. Eventually your max HP would be reduced to 1, and Megaman would get addicted to them, closing off various gameplay features (while opening a few others). Some players take it as a personal challenge to beat the game this way; but for most, it would be unwinnable at that point. However, the game does give ample warning of the dangers of excessive Dark Chip use, and it takes so many of them to reduce yourself to 1 HP that you pretty much have to be doing it on purpose. Also, while you could get your base HP down to 1, interchangeable parts that gave Mega Man extra HP were unaffected (because otherwise, taking them off would lead to all sorts of logical problems), so you could still give yourself an irreducible 501 HP or something - though in that case, you'd sacrifice the space for other powerup parts.
- Battle Network 1 actually has one of these! Yeah! At one point you need to access Mayl's PC from someplace other than her house in order to deliver an E-mail because you can't just send it on the information super highway. Uh...yeah. Anyways, if you don't have the password to get in, SCREW YOU! It's in Mayl's PC, (which you need the password to get into)...right next to another item that you need earlier in the game, so I don't think this would happen to anybody unintentionally.
- The first Mega Man Star Force also had a glitch where it was possible to get yourself stuck between an NPC and an adjacent wall. If you made the mistake of saving after doing so, well, good luck trying to get out.
In The Elder Scrolls: Morrowind, it is possible to kill NPCs with whom you must interact in order to complete the main quest. However, even if one breaks the plot in this manner, there is a "back path" to complete the game, though it is much less intuitive and requires you to fight and kill a semi-immortal god-king without access to much of the game's best equipment. The game is at least kind enough to tell the player immediately that "The Thread of Prophecy Has Been Broken" rather than making them figure it out the hard way. The sequel, Oblivion, simply does not allow you to kill any NPCs relevant to the main quest prior to completion (it is possible to kill NPCs relevant to some sidequests).
- Besides having to kill the god-king, you also had to survive the horrible backlash of using the supergizmo that lets you wield the game's final weapons. Normally, he teaches you to use it, but without him, you take massive damage the first time you equip it... so much damage that most players aren't likely to survive without excessive preparation.
  - Actually, unmodified the "wraithguard_juryrig" permanently mods your health down, leaving you crippled!
- Visiting the Astral tomb and killing the ghost without looting it ( or loosing the sul-senipul bow) result in the impossibility to valid a part of the main quest ( a common mistake made by beginners).
  - Morrowind could be made totally unwinnable, but only by killing a very specific character that you're very unlikely to find accidentally. Yagrum Bagarn, the last Dwemer, is essential both for the "main" route and the "back-door"-killing him can make it impossible to do either one, especially if you've also killed Vivec.
  - The above statement is only partially true. You don't need the previously mentioned "supergizmo" (Wraithguard) in order to use the special weapons needed to beat the main quest, but if you use them without Wraithguard, your character will be mortally wounded. That pretty much ruins your save, but you still can beat the main quest. This method is usually done for speedruns because once you win, you're done; it doesn't matter if you can't play anymore.
- It is however possible in Oblivion to obtain a certain quest item before activating the quest, which makes the game unwinnable since the quest will not detect that you have the one of a kind item, meaning the plot won't advance
  - On the other hand, its predecessor Daggerfall shipped with a number of bugs and glitches that made it impossible to complete the main quest. The plot-breaking bugs were eventually corrected with patches, but one potentially game-breaking bug, which could render the character stuck in "the void" after falling through a flight of stairs, was never satisfactorily fixed and even pops up in certain parts of Morrowind.
- Even in Oblivion, the game can be made unwinnable via important NP Cs. One mission requires that you escort Captain Burd, the leader of Bruma's military forces, to an Oblivion citadel so he could close a gate opened near Bruma. This particular citadel features a lava pit - Burd is plot-important, but if he lands in the lava he will be instantly knocked unconscious, and he can't exit the lava pit because every time he recovers, he is instantly knocked out again.
Averted in Ultima VIII in that, while you can kill plot characters or destroy important items without warning, the game will register that you've created an "unwinnable" state and refuse to allow you to save.
Ultima IX, as released, has a number of killer bugs that make the game Unwinnable. The most notorious one occurred about 2/3rds of the way into the game, in which some bad clipping code on a screen at the extreme edge of the game map caused some people to literally fall off the edge of the world, with no way back into the game, despite the fact that, visually, you were only one step away from being back on track. Worst of all, your saved games became invalid, and you were forced to start over. Thanks to Executive Meddling and the general destruction of Origin by EA, only three patches were released officially, and there were still game-breakers uncorrected at that point.
Ultima IV omitted dialog entirely from a key character. The talking Horse in Iolo's barn was supposed to give you the answer to The Riddle. Instead, when you talked with it, it said "A". If you then asked about "A", it replied with "A", and asked you "A? (y/n)" If you replied yes, it answered "A". Oops, default dialog! Unfortunately, this was the answer to the very, very, VERY last question you had to type and hit RETURN to win the game - the Codex's final question, of what Truth Love and Courage are made of.
- This became a running joke in the series. In each of Ultima V, VI and VII, Smith the Horse will say "There was something I forgot to tell you" and give you a vital clue - to a puzzle from the previous game.
- And then they sort of did it again in V. A side quest was to retrieve Lord British's Sandal Wood Box. It wasn't hinted well, and there was nothing stopping you from entering the magic mirror Point Of No Return without it. When you meet LB in his prison in the mirror, he asks if you brought "it". If you say no he will say the Sandal Wood box. If you still say you don't have it, he replies, "Then we shall be here for a very long time". (reload) Interestingly, even if you HAVE the box, if you tell him you don't, you also get to reload. The box contains the orb of the moons, but you could never open it when it was in your posession.
In Monty On The Run, if you don't choose the right items for Monty's freedom kit(a Guide Dang It to figure out), the game will be unwinnable.
Many deals of Klondike solitaire (the version that comes with Windows) are unwinnable from the start, no matter how mad your solitare skillz.
- Of the 32,000 possible random draws in Windows Free Cell, exactly one is unwinnable. Also, entering -1 or -2 as a game number will open an unsolvable game.
Like the Impossible Mission example above, the original release of Jet Set Willy could never be completed due to bugs, most notably the "Attic Bug," which would permenantly corrupt the game's data as the result of a certain enemy in "The Attic" level traveling past the ZX Spectrum's video memory and overwriting game data. The developer/publisher originally claimed that the bugs were intentional (saying that the affected rooms were filled with poison gas,) but later released some memory-writing hacks to correct them.
Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening was notorious for a door that could only be unlocked with an Interchangeable Antimatter Key, across a moat that you were meant to cross after gaining the ability to swim. However, the designers failed to realize that Link could just barely clear the moat by jumping, leaving him without both the swimming ability needed to finish the dungeon and the key needed to get said ability. (If you can't make the jump, you're probably playing the DX version, where they fixed this.)
- You can get stuck in the same way in the final dungeon. Instead of being able to bypass an area that should require the ability to swim, you can use the flash from a bomb (or trial and error) to navigate a pitch black room full of bottomless pits instead of lighting torches with the fire wand. You need four keys to get through that final path, and one key to get to the area where you get those four keys (and the fire rod). If only the keys were either not Interchangable or not Antimatter.
- Apparently you can also get stuck in Eagle's Tower. If you drop one of the orbs down a certain hole, it won't respawn properly, preventing you from completing the dungeon.
  - In the second dungeon if you used a key on a certain door near the beginning of the level before getting the bracelet, you were not able to get enough keys to reach said bracelet and the dungeon became impassable, forcing you to restart the game.
- Let's just pile them on: you can easily make it to the key-holding midboss in the Southern Face Shrine without the bow that can kill him, locking you in, if you simply jump over the lesser Armos statues before him. After all, why would it occur to you to shoot stone statues with arrows in the first place?
  - You can beat the midboss without the bow. For further fun, you also can enter Face Shrine North without the hookshot (excruciatingly difficult, but possible if you're stubborn enough to keep trying until you get that jump exactly right). Ended up unable to get the L2 bracelet necessary to complete it at that time, though (I entered the shrine while Marin was tagging along, so needless to say some items were not in inventory).
- A similar situation can occur in The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past (with missing keys), only no fancy jumping required: In the first Dark World dungeon, using one of the Interchangeable Antimatter Keys on the wrong door results in the final key ending up behind a locked door. Very frustrating indeed!
- And in Twilight Princess, there's an infamous glitch where saving and quitting at the scene where you find the big cannon before talking to an NPC makes the game unwinnable. Several known workarounds exist to allow players to talk to the invisible NPC and allow them to escape the "unwinnable" situation.
  - That bug only occurs in the Wii version, but there's another game-halting bug that occurs in both versions. After crossing the Bridge of Eldin and bombing the rock wall, a piece of the bridge will be warped away to somewhere else(later found to be the Gerudo Desert). If you happen to save and quit between here and the Twilight, you will be reloaded on the wrong side of the broken bridge with no way to get back across.
- In Phantom Hourglass, it's possible to use the hammer to enter the Goron Temple without first becoming an honorary Goron. If you claim the pure metal without doing that, your fairy won't let you leave until you become a Goron... Which you can't do because one of the Gorons grew up, so you can no longer talk to every Goron, which is one of the requirements for becoming one. But it's totally worth it because you get to see two Gongorons.
Battletoads (At least the US version on the NES) is impossible when playing with two players simultaneously—there's a bug in Level 11 where Player 2's Clinger Winger never gets up to speed, so the Hypno Orb runs you over every time. You go back to the start of the level and repeat until you run out of lives.
Several of the games in the old Action 52 compilation (for the NES and Genesis/Mega Drive) are not only Unwinnable due to shoddy programming, but a few of them are also unplayable (except on a very few emulators). Not surprising, since most of the games that actually do work really, really suck.
- To give you an idea of just how bad it is, the game's developers decided to include a small contest in the game and put a secret, personalized code at the end of one of the games, Ooze, which (along with taking a photo of the game screen showing that the player really did beat the game) would have made players eligible for a grand prize of 104 000 dollars for the sake of promoting the game. Unfortunately, there were two versions of the Action 52 cartridge. In the more known version in question inevitably hangs up two or three levels in, making the game impossible to complete.
- Other games with gamestopping bugs include Star Evil, where the boss sometimes fails to show up, and if you beat the third boss if it happens to show up, the last level is a Gray Screen of Death. Some games such as They Came crash when you die or complete a level (again, in more known version of the cartridge). Fuzz Power has an insurmountable rock wall in Level 3.
- Aversion: Many people think that the first level of Bubble Gum Rosy is unwinnable due to a seemingly impossible jump, but if you stand on the very edge so Rosie looks like she is standing on thin air, and tap the jump followed by the directional button, you can make it over. You'll wish you hadn't, though, the next level is an Unexpected Genre Change to a driving game with So Bad Its Horrible collision detection, making it nearly(but not completely) unwinnable. In pretty much all the "winnable" games, the game restarts at level 1 when you win, a form of Kobayashi Mario.
- Active Enterprises was trying to make the Cheetahmen into a Cash Cow Franchise, so they started on a sequel to the Action52 Cheetahmen game, Cheetahmen II. They folded before they could release it, but 1500 prototype copies were discoverd in a warehouse and distributed as bootlegs. It's obvious the game wasn't finished, in addition to the many annoying bugs and glitches and crippled controls, there is a game-stopping bug where the next level fails to load after you defeat the Ape Man in level 4. You can skip to levels 5 and 6 with a Game Genie, a hacked rom, or via a certain good bad bug, but after you beat the final boss there, the game just stays on the boss screen, no ending cinematic, no credits, nada.
A glitch in Super Mario Bros. 3 can cause the game to be unwinnable. In World 5, it is possible for the airship to land on the land-based portion of the map, displayed in miniature in the upper left corner of the sky map. Of course, when you chase it down to ground level, it's nowhere to be found...
- A few of the unused levels in the original game (hack or cheat code needed to play) were unfinished and included no goal/exit, meaning that the only way to get out of them is to either suicide or wait until the time runs out.
Similar to Super Metroid: In Fire Emblem for the Famicom, Medeus, the final boss of the game, has 35 Physical Defense instead of 12 as his status screen suggests, as well as complete immunity to magic spell attacks. Therefore, the only ways to scratch him in battle (and thereby be able to kill him) are by using the Falchion or any useable non-magic weapons with a Sharpness of anywhere above 15 (because everyones strength caps at 20), which is limited to Devil weapons, the Royal weapons, the Fire Dragon Stone, and the Elephant Gun. The Falchion can be missed, the Fire Dragon Stone or its users can be lost, and the other listed weapons disappear from inventory if used too much, so the player can end up having none of these weapons and therefore be unable to clear the last chapter.
- A few of the games in the Fire Emblem series have potential Unwinnable situations if you don't have the necessary weapons to even scratch final bosses along with characters with the necessary ability to use them effectively enough.
  - In particular, FE10's very long final chapter. If the team you brought can't take down the final boss, then you're going to have to start the entire game over or use an old save.
  - Genealogy of the Holy War had a final boss whose weapon had the special effect of cutting your attack strength in half, along with the customary boss stats. There is one weapon (which can be wielded by one character) in the game that neutralises the effect. Recruiting said character is a bit of a Guide Dang It and involves praying that your pool of staff wielders includes someone with a MAG stat greater than her RES. Some players HAVE managed to beat this boss with Sety (with Levin as his father for access to Holsety) regardless of halfed power, but this IS Sety we are talking about.
  - To put this more into perspective, note that halving your attack strength is not equivalent to halving your damage. There are only four units aside from the one character mentioned which break the final's defences with halved attack, all of them do single-digit damage, and one of these is effectively guaranteed to die if they attack regardless of their stats due to their caps. And Sety is one of the multitude that doesn't have enough power, so why he is being advocated here is unclear. At least the game caps minimum damage at 1 unlike most in the series.
- To remedy this in a few of the later games a character like Athos (Seventh Game) might be brought into your party for the last chapter(s). Someone with amazingly high stats and equipment, and generally nearly capped in all stats. While not a surefire way to solve it, it does make the game less Cruel (which most Fire Emblem games are). As from personal experience on my first playthrough of a Fire Emblem game, nobody had the stats to be able to face the Dragon and hurt him. Should also be said that this is part of every Fire Emblem game being amazingly baldness causingly hard.
  - Except for 2/8, but that is one of many reasons no one likes them
- Another reason why you could be stuck in an unwinnable situation in Fire Emblem is if you have done a poor job of leveling your characters. Since you can't go back to previous stages to level (except in some heretical games like FE8, where you can fight monsters whenever you want to level up), your party could be too weak to complete the chapter no matter how good your tactics are and no matter how many people you let die.
The craptacular NES game Heroes of the Lance was especially craptacular for one reason: If the easy-to-die cleric Goldmoon ever dies and you don't retrieve her Blue Crystal Staff, the game ends up unwinnable.
Return to Zork tries to make the game unwinnable whenever you kill someone, but it can easily fail. Besides the person's dialogue and options being, you know, killed away, you are also arrested for murder and punished by having your items scattered. But if you put the items down, or simply didn't need them any more, you can still win the game as a horrible, brutal serial murderer!
- Then there's the infamous bonding plant from Return to Zork. The plant appears in the first screen of the game, and since it's possible to snatch it with your hands and take it with you, that's probably what the player will do. Only much later in the game will the player discover that they needed to dig the plant up and keep it alive so it's possible to win the game. This example in particular feels like a deliberate trick on the designers' part.
In Castle Smurfenstein, a hacked version of the original Apple II Castle Wolfenstein, the game was deliberately modified so that it's impossible to get past first level, among other things.
In the original Phantasy Star, the game can easily become unwinnable very close to the end, and downright cartridge-destruction inducing if the player has the bad idea to save in this particular situation. Upon landing in the air castle, the player must fight a particularly though boss after an excessively long and confusing dungeon. Afterwards, there are three ways to leave the Air Castle: Using the heroine's teleportation spell, using a teleportation item, or using a magic nut to turn your cat ally into a flying creature. However, it is rather likely that the heroine will have ran out of MP casting her strongest spells against the boss, that cat will have bit the dust halfway through the dungeon (and rendering him unable to use the magic nut) and that the player will simply have forgotten to bring along a teleportation item. 10 bloody hours down the drain.
Phantasy Star III can become unwinnable, if you engage in a little Script Breaking in the beginning by using an Escapipe after being arrested. Apparently, you don't just break the script, you break the whole damn game. Fortunately, there's no way to save afterwards.
In Little Big Adventure you are required to break into the museum, and you are supposed to do this by using the Red Key Card on the back door in order to get to the sewers, evacuate the museum by turning on the alarm there, then come back and get the treasure from the museum. Technically, if you are skilled enough, you can skip all of this and just go through the front door, avoiding the guards, get the items and escape before getting arrested. The problem is, if you do this before getting the Card, you will no longer be able to obtain it, and since it is used to open a few more doors later on, you can't complete the game without it.
Final Fantasy Tactics had a battle with Wiegraf that was easy to make unwinnable if you saved the game before the battle and didn't have a backup save, since you couldn't leave Riovanes Castle to get equipment or gain experience. Many a player has ended up starting the game over because of this...
- Ironically, the main character had a game breaking combination of abilities that could win this battle single-handed — one of which increases his speed, the other an attack-power booster. Neither cost any MP, and they stack infinitely. As long as the main character has a large movement range than the boss, he can stay out of attack range while constantly boosting his stats, eventually to One Man Army levels. However, very few people making their first run at the game realized this.
  - They don't stack infinitely, but still high enough to kill everything with one hit and get turns at least five times faster than any enemy around there.
- Fortunately, the piece of equipment that could negate Wiegraf's most damaging attacks was hidden right next to where Ramza starts. Unfortunately, if you never got around to giving him Reequip and Treasure Hunter, this knowledge is useless, and the battle Unwinnable. Also unfortunately, the piece of equipment Randomly Drops.
In Final Fantasy IV, the game's second cave had a Point Of No Return, making it possible for you to land your airship near the entrance and cross the cave...
In Final Fastasy VI, in the World of Balance, there's a tiny patch of land to the right of Nikeah, just big enough to land the airship on. However, if you land there and go into the town, there's no way to get back—the town blocks you from reaching the patch on the World Map, and all of the exit points within the town spawn you to the left side. There's nothing preventing the player from saving the game in this situation, and without the airship, the game is utterly unwinnable. This example is especially sinister when you consider that the only reason a player would usually take the airship to Nikeah is to pick up Mog's Water Rondo dance, which becomes Lost Forever after a brief window of game events.
"Pharaoh," the first secret level of TNT: Evilution (one of the Expansion Packs that came with Final Doom,) was rendered impossible to finish by the fact that a vital key was erroneously flagged to appear only in multiplayer. id Software did not fix this bug in their distribution (and never has, to this day,) but the creators of the pack, TeamTNT, quickly released a patch allowing the key to appear in any mode. Not that it's stopped people from discovering how to complete the level without it, though.
Net Hack has uncountable ways to kill you, but only one way to become unwinnable: if you offer an animal sacrifice at an enemy god's altar while out of favour with your patron god before entering your class's quest, you will become a convert to that god's cult and cannot enter the quest, which is required to win the game. A bug? Nope. If you look in the game's source, you can see the developers included code to handle just that vanishingly unlikely situation.
Many of the physics-based puzzles in Zack and Wiki can be rendered unwinnable by performing steps incorrectly or in the wrong order, for example dropping the platform part of a see-saw into place before the base is ready. Since the game is made up of short levels that can be retried as many times as you want this isn't as evil as many of the other cases.
Sonic The Hedgehog games, by their nature, don't have Unwinnable situations pop up in normal gameplay... normal gameplay. The original release of Sonic Adventure had several glitches that allowed you to get stuck. This editor still remembers the time he glitched himself through the roof of the train station at the beginning of Tails's story, and proceeded to play and finish Casinopolis before the casino area was unlocked... and found himself unable to leave the area and stuck there by the game's auto-saving, permanently ruining the entire save file (which has stories for six characters).
- A glitch in Carnival Night Zone 2 Sonic get stuck in a quarter pipe's wall if the player makes him go too fast, and it's impossible to get Sonic out. While it doesn't make the game necessarily Unwinnable (since the player can just wait for the time to run out), the game's manual explains the glitch by saying that they are traps that Robotnik lays to take advantage of Sonic's speed and tells the player that the only way to get out is to reset the game.
- An interesting example also comes from Sonic Adventure. You can opt to obtain Sonic's optional upgrade in the Last Story, and then save and quit. When you load the game, you'll get text indicating what has last happened in the game, like in any other character's story; when you obtained the Crystal Ring determines what the text says. (For those that haven't played the game, that's not supposed to happen in the Last Story.) When the "previously" text is finished scrolling, the game will freeze. Interestingly enough, the background art is the CG of Perfect Chaos, as he looked before his final in-game design.
- There is a glitch in Sonic The Hedgehog 3/Sonic 3 and Knuckles that makes the game unwinnable if it happens; during either act of Marble Garden Zone, while playing Sonic with Tails following, it's possible to glitch Tails off the screen so you go through the rest of the Zone solo, but doing so prevents Tails from returning to aid you in fighting the Zone's main boss, and you're stuck off the screen and out of reach until you reset the game.
In Harvest Moon: A Wonderful Life, ordering new machinery can render the game unplayable if the machinery arrives on the first day right after a chapter change. The only way around this is to simply not order machinery in the last season of a chapter, as the exact date the machinery arrives is random.
- Similarly, though not a true Unwinnable situation, in the North American Harvest Moon: DS two glitches caused both the Witch Princess (the game didn't keep track of the number of dead animals) and the Harvest Goddess (Buckwheat Flour was missing, meaning you couldn't complete your shipping or cooking lists) only unable to be married (though you could still finish the game by just marrying another girl). These were corrected in an updated version (DS 1.1) and Harvest Moon: DS Cute, so these girls could be chosen for the "Best Friends Ceremony." Other glitches rendered the game frozen.
- And then in Rune Factory, saving in a cave while poisoned and sealed could render your game unwinnable if you had low enough HP and no cures for the Standard Status Effects.
I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream was edited in Germany to remove Nimdok and his scenario, because it was set in a concentration camp. This made it impossible to complete the game, because all five characters's scenarios must be finished to reach the last segment.
Sphinx and the Cursed Mummy had a save point in the Castle of Uruk, during one of the Mummy's missions. Normally, you would approach the area, see a cut scene between the Big Bad and The Dragon, and a door would open. However, if you saved at the save point, quit, and reloaded the game, the door would be closed when you re-started, rendering you trapped there forever. Nasty.
Wing Commander III: Heart Of The Tiger has a campaign path depending on your performance on previous missions where you fight against an endless wave of Kilrathi until you either quit the game or die. Wing Commander IV has a similar situation, at the point where the plot wants you to defect to the Union of Border Worlds. If you decline the second of two chances, and choose to stay with Confed, infinite waves of Border World bombers spawn up until your carrier is destroyed, ending the game. Even if you cheat and remove all the enemy craft from the mission, your carrier explodes on its own.
- It's worth noting that unlike a majority of the situations on this page these two are intentionally unwinnable. In III it's because your enemy is staging an invasion on your home system, and in the 4th because you've basically become a tool of the fascist military junta, neither outcome was intended as anything but an unwinnable scenario in terms of the games narrative.
The battle system in Crystalis includes a very questionable design choice. While it is true that when you get enough defense, some enemies are no longer able to hurt you, the same applies to the enemies. In the end, this means that if you are underleveled when you reach a boss, none of your attacks will be able to hurt it. You can't flee from a boss battle, either. Time to head back to your last save!
- Or you can use an in-game warp trick to teleport yourself to another area.
Though there's no specific instance where this happens, due to the rarity of both ammunition and health restoring items in the early games in the Resident Evil series, it was possible to save before a boss with very little of either, making the game unwinnable to most players. Later games give you enough ammunition to invade Spain, so this is less of a problem.
The original Mechwarrior for the PC required you to head to a specific planet in order to begin the sequence to beat the game. However, after a certain point in time, going to the planet merely resulted in an unceremonius 'Game Over' screen. So, typically, by the time you're able to build up your forces to a respectable level, it's too late.
- As told here, Mech Warrior 2: Mercenaries originally shipped with a game-stopping bug where the dropship fails to land at the end of one of the missions, making the mission and thus the game unwinnable.
X-COM: Terror From the Deep combines this with a long-term Luck Based Mission: it's possible to progress through the game without fighting any Deep Ones. You need to capture one alive to learn Alien USO Construction, which you need to proceed to the endgame.
- This actually resulted in a Non Standard Game Over, as the inability to proceed to the endgame would eventually result in far more alien sub activity than the player could respond to (alien activity increases linearly as game time increases), which would eventually result in all funding nations pulling funding and the player being SOL. This "bug" is, however, notoriously difficult to recreate, as Deep Ones are numerous throughout the game until a certain point.
- More notorious for making Terror From the Deep unwinnable is the Tasoth Commander. Researching one of these makes researching the Cool Starship for the final assault impossible, but thankfully patches keep them from showing up for research.
- Also, the game engine glitch that made all difficulty settings play at the same identical difficulty setting. While the original X-Com had 'easy' as the default for all its settings (even superhuman played at easy), Terror from the Deep ramped up the difficulty of the Superhuman level to address the "Too Easy!" comments regarding the original... thus even when playing on Easy, the game reacted with Superhuman challenge.
Technically, X-COM Apocalypse is never unwinnable unless you go seriously into negative funding, since you can keep plugging along even with the entirety of Mega-Primus against you, but if you miss the chance to salvage one very specific UFO type (the purple transporter) early on? You're screwed. Only the most skilled commanders will be able to weather out the alien storm to the point where they, yes, start having to use purple transporters again, simply because you've DECIMATED their ENTIRE FLEET with nothing but VALKYRIES and HAWK AIR WARRIORS! That was... interesting to say the least.
In Inindo for the SNES you eventually reach a point where you must complete a Fetch Quest in order to be rewarded with the key to unlock the door to the rest of the game. When you complete the quest and talk to the person with the key you are asked if you have space in your inventory to accept it and given a yes/no option. If the first character in your party does not have any free spaces in their inventory when you say yes then the key just disappears and there is no way to get another one. If you save the game before realizing that, for example because you checked your inventory beforehand and saw that the *second* character had space in their inventory and assumed that was okay, then the game is now stuck in an unwinnable state.
Omikron: The Nomad Soul required you to find a sleeping pill prescription hidden in a nondescript box in your apartment, get it filled, and use it to drug your boss' coffee so you may steal her ID card for use later in the game. Failure to do so early on (with no provocation whatsoever) renders the game unwinnable many painful hours later.
- On a similar vein, a robotic character later makes an offhand mention of his aching joints amid a wall of dialogue. If you don't then go out and find some oil for said robot, the door locks, the game becomes unwinnable, and you don't find out until much later.
Warhammer - Shadow of the Horned Rat had a stage with so many Orcs it was deemed "impossible" by the makers themselves, and for good reason, there was no stage beyond it. One wily player managed to get through, only to have the game lock up as it tried to load a stage that didn't exist.
Baldurs Gate had a nonstandard game over where if you leveled accusations at the Big Bad without the evidence on your person (or at least the person of one of your party members), you would get called on it and subsequently hit with a flamestrike spell against which there was no save and instantly killed you. Since the invitation's icon looked like any of a dozen scrolls you might have been carrying around at the time, and since non-magical game items would decay after a certain amount of time...
In Baldurs Gate 2, there is a point at which you have to fight Irenicus (and a bunch of minions) in Spellhold. Normally, you just have to get him down to a certain amount of hit points, triggering a dialogue in which he teleports away. You can then exit Spellhold and continue the game. However, if you somehow get extraordinarily (un)lucky and Irenicus fails his save against Disintegrate, he does indeed Disintegrate - which renders the game Unwinnable, since he's no longer around to trigger the dialogue and you can't move on.
- One of the designers of the game, Dave Gaider, made a mod for the Throne of Bhaal expansion pack, making the last battle of the series far more difficult. One of the features is that one of your old enemies, the vampire Bodhi, is teleported in from the Abyss to fight on behalf of the Big Bad. The only problem is that, by this point, any clerics you may have in your party are so hugely overpowered that if you enter the last battle with 'turn undead' on, she explodes into chunky giblets before she even has a chance to say her menacing dialogue, thus stopping the game in it's tracks. Unwinnable or no, I nearly fell out of his chair laughing.
In the PC mystery game Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Silver Earring, the action takes place over the course of a series of days. The game is rendered unwinnable on the first day if Holmes neglects to pick up a particular clue. This seems to be a glitch, rather than by design, since failure to pick up any other clues will cause the game to prevent him from moving forward, but it will allow him to go ahead even if he doesn't pick up the autographed picture in the young woman's dressing room. The player will be unaware that there's a problem until the fourth day in-game, when he is supposed to show that clue to someone; his inability to do so brings the game to a screeching halt.
In Tokyo Xtreme Racer 3, to face the last opponent and be able to finish the game, you must defeat the other 599 opponents. However, one particular opponent, Whirlwind Fanfare, only appears when you have 100,000,000 CP, and the maximum CP you can carry is 99,999,990. Due to this glitch, it is impossible to beat the game without using a cheat device.
In the flash game "Pandemic 2," the game is unwinnable if Madagascar shuts its ports. (This is because to win the game, you have to kill the whole world with your disease, and the ports are Madagascar's only connection to other countries.) Your actual chance at winnable is pretty slim. If someone in Brazil even so much as coughs, they'll pretty much freakout and close their port to avoid infection. Not to mention that very few ships go to Madagascar, or leave there if you happen to start there. However, the game does occasionally glitch and allow a ship into a closed port.
- Or if Peru closes their borders, which means you have to get Mexico, Argentina, or Brazil fairly quickly, because Peru has neither a seaport nor an airport. Of course, if you get Mexico or Brazil, your infection numbers go way up and the world starts to freak out.
- They don't even have to cough. In a fairly ridiculous twist, countries will close down their borders even to diseases with absolutely no symptoms.
- My favourite was the entire world burning bodies to stop the spread of the disease when the disease was nonlethal and hadn't killed a single person.
- In the original Pandemic, if you start killing people before your disease has spread to every continent, it's more likely than not that they'll close their borders and make the game unwinnable.
- With the hysteria over Swine Flu, this is beginning to turn into a case of Truth In Television.
Both Baten Kaitos games pull this one. In the first, saving on a certain airship makes it so you can't level up until you clear the airship, and, naturally, said airship has That One Boss at the end. Origins does the same thing, only in a dungeon right after a disc change, so you almost certainly have just saved over your file during the disc-switching prompt. Nice.
True Crime: New York City had a laundry list of randomly occuring Game Breaking Bugs that could cause certain missions or the game to become unwinnable, making Save Scumming a neccessity, but even worse, the X Box version had a big bug late in the game that rendered it completely unwinnable due to no fault of the player.
Many RPGs have dungeons you cannot exit until you finish them. Some, such as Final Fantasy XII are nice, and warn you of the fact so you can save in a different file. Others, such as Star Ocean The Second Story are not quite so nice.
The entire Shadow Of The Beast series. In addition to having exactly 1 life, a quick-draining life bar, and no way to save or continue, absolutely every single puzzle in the entire series would make the game unwinnable if you failed it on the first try. Pretty graphics, though.
- Shadow Of The Beast 3 gives you 3 lives, alleviating things somewhat (along with generally being easier, although it still has its Unwinnable moments).
The Impossible Quiz. As you progress through the game, you're given skips, which you can use to skip most questions. At the very end, however, the last question is introduced as either the easiest question or the hardest. Turns out you have to use all your skips to pass it, and if you used just one the game is impossible to win and you have to start over from the start.
In Heart of Winter, the expansion pack for Icewind Dale, there is a scene in which a fight breaks out among members of the tribe the player has been assisting, with the expectation that the player will pile in on the side of the rebels. During this scene, if a friendly tribe member is inadvertantly hit (as can very easily happen with the mess of area effect spells available to the party by this point in the game), all other friendly tribe members will immediately turn hostile, though the game will give no indication that this has happened. If this is not noticed and an earlier saved game reloaded, it is perfectly possible to slaughter the entire tribe, never realising something is amiss right up until the NPC who is supposed to trigger the next sequence of events instead attacks and mercilessly butchers the party. If this situation occurs and an earlier savegame is not present, the game is unwinnable.
Due to the main character's immortality, Planescape Torment only ends if the game is made Unwinnable via dialogue or combat.
Prince of Persia: the Two Thrones has a glitch that makes a critical jump unfinishable. The only way to progress if you strike that bug is to download a savegame from someone who didn't.
- That's nothing compared to Prince Of Persia: Warrior Within, which is riddled with Game Breaking Bugs that can land you in Unwinnable situations, for example, the "Sand Wraith bug" which occurs early on in the game if you save in the wrong place, so you get turned into the Sand Wraith before you're supposed to, and the subsequent Unwinnable situation happens to occur near the end of the game right before the final boss, so you end up having to start the game over after coming all that way.
  - Late in the game, it's possible to return to various sections to collect upgrades you missed earlier, but, due to a glitch, one of them is a dead end, with not one, but two save points in it, making it easy to save yourself into an unwinnable state.
  - In Sands of Time there's one room near the end where Ferah waits by a switch and will not pull it until you complete a set of puzzles before hand. Once everything is ready, Farah should pull the lever automatically... Except sometimes she doesn't and will stand there silently while you jump around in anger and grope for the 'reset' button.
Most of the later Pokemon games have a straight pathway from the exit of Victory Road into the Pokemon league room and through the one way door for the first Elite 4. This makes it possible to get through Victory Road and accidentally walk straight into Pokemon league battle rooms. The only way out of this is to either turn off the game load somewhere in or before Victory Road or try and defeat the entire Pokemon league (impossible if you have just come through VR)and re-spawn in the last PC you were at (which will be before VR). Basically you have to go through Victory Road again.
Although extremely difficult, it is technically possible to make Monster Rancher 2 Unwinnable. You get a Game Over if, at the start of the month, you have less than 100 G and are unable to feed your monster. You can reload from an earlier save, but the only way for this situation to be a truly unwinnable one is if you saved after the last tournament of the month your monster could possibly enter, you have no items to sell, your monster is too young to sell, all of your monsters in storage are too young to sell, and your monster never brings you any item you could possibly sell for money out of the blue. Whew!
- Isn't it ironic that a game's Unwinnable scenario is itself a nearly Unwinnable possibility to recreate intentionally?
In Baldur's Gate, the city of Baldur's Gate has an NPC who holds the final antidote to a scripted event where your entire party is given a game-ending poison that cannot be cured except by playing through a long scripted sequence with the antidote as a reward. If you have met this NPC before the sequence started, got into an argument with him and KILLED him, there will be no one there to give you the antidote. The seven day deadline will roll by and your entire party will explode into bloody PC kibble (that is some absurdly effective poison right there). Even Biff the Understudy seems to consider this role beneath his (severely limited) acting ability, and if all your savegames take you back to AFTER the moment you killed this specific NPC...
- If you start as a wizard in either Baldurs Gate or Shadows of Amn and have only 3 Constitution, you can't win. You will die in the first in-game cutscenes, as enough points of unavoidable damage are dealt to you that your pathetically low Hit Points. Of course, in game terms this makes sense, as if any character with a Constitution of 3 ventures out beyond a hermetically sealed clean room...they're probably not gonna make it.
The Addams Family for Game Boy. The only two levels you cannot leave by the same way you came in and you need certain items. The Toybox, by the time you've enterd this level, you better have completed the Boiler Room level so has to have the Hot Coal weapon as the boss in this level is immune to all other weapons and who'd of thought to shoot the boss in the arse. The River, forget to pick up the fish potion on the way into the river and your game is over, even if you know the hidden route to walk from one end of the level to the other as the boss is unbeatable.
- Two non-compulsory levels requires you to have completed The River. The Swamp, you need the Icecube item to float accross the titular sections. Ice box, you need the icecubes to float accross the freezing pools of water or the fish potion to swim accross.
Bio Shock features Mini Game unwinnability — the hacking minigame is a Pipe Dream-type puzzle where you have to create a path of tiles from the entrance to the exit, avoiding trap tiles which will fail the puzzle. For the most difficult hacks, the game may happily serve up an unbeatable puzzle with a solid wall of trap tiles between the entrance and exit. This is an acknowledged design decision; there are plasmids to find or purchase which remove trap tiles, and with enough of these, the chances of getting an unwinnable puzzle are almost nil.
An minigame Easter Egg in one of the Homestar Runner shorts is *intentionally* unwinnable. It's Super Kingio Brothers, and it's essentially the first stage of Super Mario Bros. Except you're playing as the ludicrously unhealthy King of Town. Who cannot jump over the first Goomba.
Metroid Prime 2 includes a number of rooms, each with several switches that must be shot in order to progress. If the player triggers some of the switches, then leaves the room, the game becomes unwinnable (or some items inaccessible, depending on which room) because the game resets the counter, but does not reactivate the switches.
- You can also trigger a super-jump glitch while fighting the boss Chykka, letting you leave the room (the doors don't lock). If you do this, however, Chykka is gone for good — along with the reward for that fight, the Dark Visor, which is required to beat the game. You can play with the super-jump glitch safely, but only if you beat Chykka first.
- The first Prime game had a similar Unwinnable bug which was fixed in later releases. When you beat the Phazon Elite, the doors unlock and he leaves behind the Artifact of Warrior. If you're careless enough to leave the room without collecting the artifact, it will never return.
- Metroid Prime 3 falls victim to this trope as well. In the Space Pirate Homeworld there's a certain room which contains an elevator that you must cause to collapse all the way to a lower level by blowing up two blocks on the floor, or using the spinner, I forget which one. The room the elevator leads to contains a mini-boss fight, when you emerge victorious from said fight you receive the Nova Beam (aka the final/most powerful beam in the game), which you need in order to open certain doors in the area and kill Omega Ridley. Anyway, here's the glitch, the blocks have to be disposed of in a certain order ( I believe it's right, then left) or else the elevator fails to collapse, meaning the room, mini-boss fight and the beam are all Lost Forever, which in turn renders your game unwinnable. Oh did I mention this room is found about 3/4 of the way in? Oh, what's that? You, unknowingly, happened to save after blowing up the blocks in the wrong order? Tough shit pal, you'll have to start a whole new game and get to that room once again and hope you remember which block it is you need to blow up first. I don't know whether or not this happened only in the initial copies of the game, but needless to say I was beyond pissed when it happened to me...
As with all over day-to-day games, Night of The Comet can be rendered unwinnable if you fail to meet up with a certain person on a certain hour of the day, or failure to get an item at the right time. There's very little hint for this.
The first run of Cardfighters DS was literally unwinnable thanks to a Gamestopping Bug that causes it to crash when a player fights a certain character. None of the NPC battlers can be skipped. Thankfully for those who really want the game, they fixed this with a second print.
Heaven help you if you're ever placed upon a table against a CPU opponent in WWE Smack Down vs. RAW 2008. Your opponent can hit you with repeated forearm shots to your upper chest, and no matter how many buttons you mash in frustration, your guy can't get up off the table before the next forearm shot comes. And the next one. And the next one.
In the "Operation Rapunzel" level of Medal of Honor: Frontline, if you happen to backtrack for health items or ammo after rescuing the hostage, he will disappear, rendering the level unwinnable. "So what do you do? Guess you just gotta commit suicide".(The Angry Video Game Nerd, when he got stuck in an unwinnable situation in his Mc Kids review)
- In one level of Return To Castle Wolfenstein, you have to avoid setting off any alarms and sneak into a truck at the end without being noticed. This level contains a major game-stopping bug, at least in the X Box version: if you shoot out the last alarm with anything other than the silenced sniper rifle, the truck driver will still be alerted to your presence, albeit unable to sound the alarm; you won't get a "Mission Failed", but the level will become unfinishable. Seems they should have made alerting the truck driver itself a Non Standard Game Over. Better keep multiple saves, it's a pain to have to play through this level all over again.
In Secret of Evermore for the SNES, there is one part of the game where a scientist gives you an airplane to use for a fetch quest so he can build a rocket to send you to the end of the game. It is possible, through an obscure glitch, to land back in the scientist's lab without the plane. If the player hasn't completed the fetch quest at this point the game is now unwinnable (and it is possible to save, ruining the player's progress about 3/4 of the way through an SNES RPG).
- It's also possible to get stuck in the third part of the game, the medieval land. After defeating the Chess monster, and going trough a cavern, and ending up in the desolate town. You climb a massive bunch of ramps and at the top you are brought back to the populated town, where it's expected you fight a boss in the castle there. However, go trough the cave again, and you're stuck in the desolate town seeing as your airride won't come back.
- One dungeon is filled with collapsible bridges. This is standard fare for video games, but unlike the standard-issue Magical Self-Repair Bridge, once these collapse, they're gone forever. As could be expected, this leads to at least one unwinnable situation—if you use an item or formula to escape before defeating the dungeon's mini-boss but after crossing the bridge to get to it, you'll be unable to get back and thus unable to complete the dungeon. If you're unfortunate enough to save while you're outside, your save file is rendered unwinnable.
- The area before the Verminator is inescapable and inhabited by nothing but fast-moving rats that are worth a piddly 4 EXP each. If you're underleveled and you saved, the game is as good as unwinnable. Did we mention the Verminator is That One Boss and this area is 3/4 of the way through the game?
  - Ironically, this boss can be avoided altogether by utilizing a glitch in the previous area, but if you ever go into his room, the game will lock the door and not open it until the code signifying you've beaten the boss goes through. Since the boss doesn't actually appear, it's impossible to initiate this code and the player is forced to reset. Unwinnable revenge!
In the ATARI 2600 game Adventure, the highest difficulty placed items at random. This sometimes resulted in situations where the keys to the castles were inside each other, creating an unwinnable game state from the very beginning.
Like the aformentioned 7800 port of Impossible Mission, the disastrous DOS port of the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is unwinnable due to no fault of the player, since there is a jump in the sewers of Area 3 that is impossible to negotiate due to a low ceiling. Unless, that is, you use a cheat code to walk through walls or skip levels.
- Would you believe you could get over that spot just fine if you simply walked over it? Yeah. Kind of unintuitive.
  - Wrong area. You're thinking of the building with the missiles at the beginning of the level.
In Tiny Toon Adventures: Buster Busts Loose, the computer automatically controls Buster just before the front of the train and assumes that the R button is assigned to Dash. If you assigned the R button to anything else, Buster falls to his death instead.
In the Story Mode of the Playstation version of Jo Jos Bizarre Adventure, the first two parts of Stage 24 (against Daniel J. D'Arby) are intentionally unwinnable to follow the plot of the manga. The first is a minigame in which you must bet on which piece of meat the cat eats (the cat, who belongs to D'Arby, eats both). In the second game, you must drop coins into a glass of water without it overflowing, and the AI will always make you overflow no matter how good you think you are.
The original Alternate Reality game for the Atari 8-bit computers had single squares surrounded by walls, with secret doors in and no way out. And you could save in there, making the game unwinnable. This was originally described in the company's newsletter as if it were a desirable feature.
The Turbografx-16 version of the Nintendo Hard Impossamole had shoddily placed Points Of No Return in some levels so that if you missed a Plot Coupon(scroll) beforehand it would be Lost Forever. And having Monty commit suicide didn't help either if you crossed a reload point after the Point Of No Return, so the mission would be Unwinnable unless you lose all your lives and start from the beginning. Talk about bad level design.
The Game Boy Advance version of The Lord Of The Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring has a bug that makes the game unwinnable if you do not save at a specific point during a transition between scenes. Probably a merciful end to a game So Bad Its Horrible.
The C64 game Space Rogue was, for all intents and purposes, virtually Unwinnable because the required Plot Coupon item needed to rig your ship to go to the ant invader's home sector cannot be obtained. It is supposed to be a randomly drawn item from Robocrook's chance game (making it a pure luck scenario) but it never drops.
In the Game Boy game The Bugs Bunny Crazy Castle 2, the hammer at the beginning of stage 16 is not needed. But if you miss a key early in the level, you'll need the hammer to get back to it; otherwise, you'll have to find an enemy and kill yourself. But as it's also one of the few stages where you can kill every enemy, it's possible to wind up in an enemy-free stage, with no way to beat the level, and no way to kill yourself to try again.
The fan-made RPG Maker game, Mega Man: The RPG, has a couple of cases of this, clearly unintended:
- If you use one of the teleportation items while you're in the raft, the raft comes with you, which gets it stuck in the square where you land. If you had any need to use the raft to get anywhere, well... better hope you saved before you did that.
- When you first meet Dr. Wily, it's as Mega Man alone, and it's a Hopeless Boss Fight. Immediately after that, cut to Cut Man and Elec Man finding a way into the same room. Dr. Wily sees them, taunts you, your characters get healed, and the battle begins again, beatable this time. Well, that's what happens if both Cut Man and Elec Man are alive when you get there. If not, you get a Game Over screen after the taunt. To make matters worse, the revival item doesn't work!
In Golden Eye 007 and Perfect Dark, failing a mission objective doesn't result in an immediate Non Standard Game Over, you only get that when you exit the level, which you sometimes can't even do, as in the case of the Runway level if the plane gets blown up, so you end up wandering around in a walking-dead situation. Perfect Dark does notify you "objectives failed: abort mission" if this happens.
- Goldeneye also warns you. Kill a scientist and find out.
- Oddly, Perfect Dark warns you to abort the mission too early in some circumstances. One example is if you kill everyone not in the basement on the Villa, the "leave one soldier alive for interrogation" objective will be Failed - however, if you then pummel one of the basement guards, it will then change to Incomplete and then Complete.
- Another level gives you the "Abort Mission" message of a box full of explosives you're toting to a specific wall blows up beforehand, but you can find an alternative source of explosions to complete the mission.
The 21st-century Ace Combat games (04, 5, Zero, and 6) somewhat avert this; even if you passed each preceding stage with the lowest grade/rank and thus the minimum amount of money/credits, you should have enough to get a good enough plane to clear the next stage and eventually the whole campaign. You can't backtrack in the campaign though, and (for example) in AC 04 you only gain money through the campaign, not the post-clearing Free Missions.
- At no point does the plane you're flying render the game unwinnable. It's always possible to finish the game with the default plane, just very difficult.
In Portal it is possible, if you try very hard, to accidentally loose a weighted storage cube to a portal glitch that makes it randomly disappear, this makes most levels unwinnable.
- There are many situations where you can trap yourself or make a puzzle unbeatable; the developers have figured out most of them and made Glados deliver another cube or open the door if you manage to do so. There are, however, several ways to trap yourself that they haven't thought of, such as piling cameras under the weighted companion cube to support it while it's partway on the button, going through the door where the button to open the incinerator is, and then shoot a portal to make the camera fall through and the cube come off the button, so the door closes and you're trapped.
The freeware game ROX has a levelset with one of the levels supposedly unwinnable with no fault at your side — it's a simple mistake. On level 57 "Omega" two of the bombs in the chain reaction drops out of it right before the chain reaction blows them up. There's a guide out there by Damian Sawyer describing a supposed "walkthrough" of this level, but it doesn't describe anything unusual to deal with that part of the level, and I have seen no reports of success.
In Grand Theft Auto III, conflicting missions can make 100% completion impossible if taken out of order. For instance, one mission will have you betray a crime boss's trust and kill him, a bad idea if you haven't finished his missions for you yet. Thankfully, later games in the series avoid this pitfall.
- San Andreas had a huge Game Breaking Bug affecting a certain non-optional mission, where Mad Dogg jumps to his death too early, making it and the game unfinishable. If you encounter this bug, Begin New Game and hope it doesn't happen again.
Fallout 3: There is a glitch which causes Megaton residents to randomly die. (Residents on the upper floors may clip past railings and fall to their death.) Although it won't prevent you from finishing the main storyline, it does cut off some lucrative quest lines.
- Like Oblivion (above), some quest-critical NPCs are invincible, but some are not and can die when wandering the Wasteland. Especially once you start seeing Deathclaws and packs of Radscorpions as random encounters.
- Also, At one stage in the game, you are required to get a key off an overseer. Wanna kill him? Better wait til you get the key, coz without it, you can't progress.
- Nasty Unwinnable: the infamous Lamplight Vault Access Bug. As the main quest progresses, you discover that a critical Vault cannot be entered by its main door, period (it's not even connected to the actual Vault). Instead, you have to get in via Little Lamplight, but even THOSE accesses are blocked until you unlock the proper dialog with the proper NP Cs, even if you find them independently. But FO 3 is so open-ended, it's entirely possible that you'll complete the quest which unlocks one of the dialog paths before you ever find Little Lamplight. Or you might find and talk your way into Little Lamplight before the main quest fires the need to go there. If you do either of these things, BOTH dialog paths are pre-empted from the game entirely as though they never existed, with the result that you can't complete the main quest at all. You'll likely be hours of gameplay and dozens of saves down the road before this bug rears its ugly head, and the only known solution is to fire up the console and use a clipping cheat to move past the barriers. Because the FO 3 Game Guide shipped with a specific note on avoiding these things in order to complete the quest, it's clear that Bethesda knew about the problem prior to shipping. As of this date, it still hasn't been patched and may never be...an apparent example of Unwinnable By Design.
- The recent additional episode to the game, The Pitt, shipped with a bug that made the episode impossible to complete, as the game freezes instantly when approaching the Downtown area.
The never-released "Penn & Teller: Smoke and Mirrors" game was basically a big collection of Mind Screw minigames. The "central" game "Smoke & Mirrors" was a platformer-RPG-adventure-ish construct where you play as Penn & Teller themselves. The game came with two difficulties: Normal and Impossible. If you play on Impossible, you get to walk down a street for about a screen before running into Lou Reed, who kills the duo by shooting lightning from his eyes. There's no way to avoid this. "Sorry boys, this is Impossible mode. Difficult is winning the Nobel Prize. Impossible is eating the sun." Game over.
In the SNES version of Shadowrun, if you didn't select the "Talk" option during one of your first conversations of the game, you would miss a vital "Ask About..." topic that would make it impossible to continue. You wouldn't discover this until about two thirds of the game later.
In at least the Amiga version of Shadowgate, there's a glitch in a room where you have to take a shield first in a room to protect yourself while you pick things up. If you leave before taking the proper items you need to advance, and come back to get them, the shield no longer protects you for some reason, making the game unwinnable if you've saved after leaving the room without said items.
One area in the final level of Psychonauts features an Advancing Wall Of Doom that requires you do a lot of fancy jumping to avoid it, using all of your different jump techniques. However, a seemingly random bug can activate in this part of the level, where your double jump refuses to work... Thus dooming you to a watery grave. Fun. Just like the rest of the level.
One area of Beyond Good And Evil has an enemy that drops a necessary key when defeated. However, a bug occasionally causes the key to spawn in the wrong place, making it unreachable. Worse is that the spot where this happens is right next to a save spot, so a player unaware that they're supposed to be picking up a key might save after the fight, and find themselves stuck.
- Also, if you don't take Pey'j's Boots from a Locker you can't go back and get them later when you need the randomly generated code to get the spaceship you need to finish the game with.
In Graffiti Kingdom, the fight against Telepin can be literally impossible if you haven't caught on to some completely-unexplained-but-necessary-to-know game concepts [such as swiping monsters with Pixel's wand giving you access to their attacks]; before then, it is difficult, but entirely possible, to get through the game with only the basics. Not truly unwinnable, as you can remedy this by going back into the level to grab some better moves, but it definitely seems that way when you're playing the game for the first time, and many players simply give up at this point and never play again.
In the original Alone In The Dark, you need two small mirrors to proceed further into the game. However, if a monster attacks you just once while you are carrying the mirrors, they will shatter, and thus are Lost Forever. There are only two mirrors in the entire game, and without both of them intact, the game is rendered unwinnable.
- Because of a Broken Bridge (that breaks as you cross it), there are at least three ways to make the last part unwinnable:
  - Not picking up the Pirate's Chest key, the chest which contains the Gem needed to enter the maze and Final Boss room.
  - Running out of fuel for your oil lamp (can't negotiate the maze or defeat the Final Boss without it).
  - Possibly missing the library's secret room (Guide Dang It!), which contains the Talisman. Not sure if this is actually required, though.
  - Not picking up the lighter (need it to relight the lamp after getting wet)
  - Negleting to move the barrels so you can later use the passage get back through the cellar. Even if you do, the items you missed are still Lost Forever, as you can't go back to the house till you defeat the Final Boss (the passage back is blocked by the Chthonian Worm).
- There's also an aversion. You get a weapon that shatters in about five hits against monsters, and later you run into a puzzle where it's needed. Unwinnable? Nope, just pick up the pieces and use them.
The SNES version of Puzzle Bobble/Bust-a-Move has 100 levels as opposed to 30 in the arcade, and apparently one of the causes that makes it unwinnable is that you lose too much.
Interesting aversion in Persona 3: bosses occur on a fixed date, but you as the player are in almost complete control over how much you level up due to the choice of going to Tartarus or not. As such, it seems like it would be possible to not level up/prepare properly for the boss, save right before it and get a game over for having it floor you, and be unable to advance because you've stuck yourself in a corner. Fortunately, the game limits its save points to make sure you can't save the game at any point when you couldn't go to Tartarus before the boss. Also, your party members will not suffer from fatigue (in the original), or leave to rest when they get tired (in the Updated Rerelease) the night before a boss (though this is kind of odd when said boss is an Anticlimax Boss they didn't know they'd be fighting). Persona 4 replaces limited save points with the option to go back a week before the deadline.
Bubble Bobble Revolution for the DS has a glitch that causes the boss to not load in Level 30, making the game Unwinnable. The bug was fixed in the v1.1 release.
Oddworld: Abe's Exoddus had a save-state system, although one major flaw on the player's part could lead to an unwinnable state. If the player saves the game while:
- Falling down an endless pit or from lethal height
- Getting hit by a slig's bullet
- Eaten by a scrab
- Eaten by a paramite
- Zapped by a greeter
- Hit by a falling crate/rock
then you will find yourself in an endless loop. Its alright if its just a save state but if you ACTUALLY saved your game moments before an inevitable death then its back to the beginning of the game for you!
Halo series: Overzealous speedrunning or Sequence Breaking can cause critical enemies (e.g. those who open Locked Doors) or vehicles to fail to spawn, or other scripted events to fail to activate, resulting in a stage being unwinnable. If you saved after a checkpoint of no return, you're fucked. Restart.
- The series' autosaving also often lands players in unwinnable situations, e.g. without enough ammo or the proper weapons in a battle. A particularly infamous example is on Truth And Reconciliation, where a checkpoint sometimes activates just as Keyes is being killed. "We're screwed! We're screwed man!"
- Depending on the circumstances, sometimes after being stuck in an unwinnable autosave situation for a few deaths, the game will punt you back to an earlier autosave. If you find yourself in a situation that is possibly winnable but incredibly difficult, multiple suicides to trigger this might be a good idea.
In Tomb Raider, if you happen to save the game while sliding down a ramp that seems to lead to the next area, but instead leads to a Bottomless Pit (or similar), your only choice is to start the game again, from the beginning (or load an even previous state, which most likely doesn't exist).
- Lara's able to navigate pits of spikes if she walks through them. However, if she saves while standing in the spikes, and the save is later reloaded, the game assumes she's fallen on them and she dies instantly.
- Tomb Raider: Anniversery. You need the motorbike. You will keep needing the motorbike. Don't leave it parked somewhere stupid where you can't reach it like This Troper did.
- There are many, many, many stupid times to save in Tomb Raider. Thank Christ for the invention of Check Points, in the games where they're available.
A common mistake when Save Scumming games such as First Person Shooters is saving a split-second before an unavoidable death. Hope you had that extra saved game.
The Chip N Dales Rescue Rangers game on the NES had a Game Genie code that would make you invincible, but did not prevent you from being stunned by attacks. The result was that if you got caught in certain areas that were rapidly attacked, you'd be stuck. Interestingly, the Game Genie manual specifically warns you about this in the code's description.
Some side-scrolling shooters fall into a specific, less air-tight form of this if they have a lot of PowerUps that transfer from level to level but are lost when the player loses a life. If you couldn't beat That One Boss with an Armageddon's worth a weaponry, how are you going to beat it with a single gun that fires plain bullets in one direction?
- See Continuing Is Painful for examples.
Played for laughs in early flashes from Neurotically Yours. Onegame has Foamy asking you to rough up Germaine by smacking her ass with a two by four. There are 12 buttons, each one being a higher level of pain than the other. Hitting button 12 kills Germaine instantly, which causes Foamy to tell you how stupid you are because he said to beat her, not kill her. No matter how often you press the other 11 buttons, nothing happens beyond the abuse. After you kill Germaine, if you hit play again, Foamy tells you you're a sick bastard.
In Crysis, the player can attempt to fight the final boss without picking up the nuke gun required to kill the boss. Since the game blocks your escape, all you can do is sit there and listen to your friend yell "Use the tac gun to take out that cannon!" while you scream, "I DON'T HAVE THE TAC GUN, YOU WERE SUPPOSED TO REMIND ME TO BRING IT!"
Earthbound has an example of this if you run a pirated copy. It will start by loading a subroutine at the game's boot. It first looks to make sure that there's only 8 kbs of SRAM, or the save game battery. If it has more, IE most cartridge copiers, it brings up a screen saying "It is a serious crime to copy video games."
- Both games also check the processor of the SNES. If it is PAL, it will refuse to boot with an error saying it wans't designed for your Super Famicom or Super NES.
- It later checks for another subroutine that looks for a checksum at a specific memory address, and if it doesn't match, it brings up the previous screen.
- If that succeeds, it runs another subroutine whenever a specific address is run. If it fails, then more, many many many MANY more, enemies show up in an effort to make the game completely unenjoyable.
- The last one is a spoiler, but if you approach the final boss, it does a check. If it fails, the game crashes AND it deletes all your save files.
- The Megadrive game Puggsy also does a similar check. Several levels in, it tries to access the game's SRAM. If it succeeds, it boots you out and tells you to buy a real copy. Puggsy doesn't have a save system, it's all passwords.
The original Diablo disables the "SAVE" option when you die. However, it does so a few frames late, and during these few frames it's difficult, but possible to save already dead and watch your character die instantly each time you reload. There's only one save slot. While you can start the game over with your character's current stats (much like a New Game Plus, except accessible from the very beginning), you'll lose anything you had left lying around in town (which is likely to be a lot, due to Grid Inventory and Nothing Fades). But hey, it's your own damn fault for saving when you knew you were dead.
One of the mini-dungeons in Majora's Mask requires using a Bombchu to blow up a hole on the ceiling. If you screw up with the Bombchu and run out of them, you're forced to save, quit and restart in order to do the entire dungeon over again. Granted, this dungeon is optional, but if you want the awesome Bragging Rights Reward...
The 7th Saga. Don't fight Valsu over level 40, when he could know the game breaking Elixir spell. Also, it's possible, after fighting Gariso, to be stuck in an area with monsters too tough for you to handle, so don't fight him until you're at least level 35.
A big one in Out of This World, among other examples: If you flood the cave with water, but fail to shoot out the wall of the pit so you can get back into the flooded caverns as well as cross the pit, you'll be stuck wandering with your hands in your pockets, unable to progress. Better keep those older passwords handy. You also get stuck if Buddy gets killed.
The Dirty Harry game for the NES has a completely normal-looking room which you can not exit when you enter it, forcing you to reset the system. And it's not a bug either, because the door is replaced with a graffiti writing "ha ha ha".
In Atelier Iris 2: The Azoth of Destiny, there is a point in the story where the item "Flay Hammer" is required to proceed with the game. You cannot learn how to make it at this point, so if you do not have it already, the game becomes unwinnable. To be fair, the recipe is very difficult to miss.
In The Dark Spire, it is possible to advance the One-Winged Angel's quest line before obtaining the key item Angel's Bracelet necessary to complete her storyline. This causes the player to be unable to obtain the key item Black Orb, rendering the game unwinnable.
World Of Warcraft, being an open ended MMORPG, is not subject to unwinnable situations in the general sense, but there have been numerous occasions throughout its history where specific quests and/or dungeons have been broken due to scripting failures or other issues. In most cases these have to be fixed by a game patch. Notorious ones include:
- Many quests involving scripted NPCs could break when the script failed to leave the NPC in an interactive state upon completion, preventing any other players from getting or completing its quest(s) until the server was restarted or a kind GM despawned the offending NPC.
- Nefarian, Final Boss of the Blackwing Lair raid dungeon, despawns temporarily if the players fail to kill him. However, there was a bug where the door separating his room from the rest of the dungeon, which locks during the encounter, would fail to open again, shutting raiders out unless they had wipe prevention or left the dungeon entirely for 30 minutes to allow it to reset.
- Final bosses in World Of Warcraft seemed to be particularly prone to this trope. The original Ragnaros would regain health while submerged in the lava, making him unkillable with even the most cutting-edge gear of the day. C'Thun, the final boss of Ahn'Qiraj, was broken for more than a month as he would randomly spawn tentacles inside his stomach and target swallowed players with unavoidable deadly attacks. Oh, and let's not forget Vashj and her Goddamned Sporebats.
Left 4 Dead now includes a mode of play that is intentionally unwinnable. You can play any level in the game, including a new one added for the mode, but there's always something wrong somewhere in the level that makes progress impossible (an elevator intended to take the survivors to the roof might get stuck one floor above them, for instance, with the staircase barricaded.)
In madda cheeb adventure, a so bad it's good Halo game with the cheeb's poses riped off from other places, it's impossible to beat stage one with out losing a life if you have two slivers of health left, if your lucky, one. That is, because the boss shoots whip after whip of bullets (before just going up and down, shooting two bullets in a row) and you can't escape. however, this game could be classifed as Fake Difficulty, seeing as stage two hints that you have to get so many mini-war hogs without getting hit once or else you will run out of time.
In the first Samurai Warriors game there is a level where you must accompany Goemon to an escape point within a certain time limit. There is a nasty bug in two-player mode where if Player 2 reaches the endpoint before Player 1, the ending will never trigger and you will be stuck standing at the escape point with Goemon until the time limit runs out wondering what is going on. Thankfully, I believe this is fixed if you load from the Xtreme Legends disk.
Anyone who doesn't know how to race swoops should never attempt to run Knights Of The Old Republic based on just the autosaves. Since it autosaves at loading screens at set invervals, it's entirely possible for it to autosave in a position where your swoop is just about to explode.
In the American version of Super Mario Bros 2, one could make the game unwinnable by crouching (works with the small characters as well, IIRC) and sliding into a passage of only one block height. Since the player can't auto slide out of it as it happens in the rest of the games, the character gets stuck permanently, and since there's no time limit, the only solution is to reset the game and start again.
Evil Dead: Hail to the King contained a particularly frustrating unwinnable glitch. At the start of the second disc, you're supposed to save the game at a save point immediately upon arriving in Damascus, then leave the area, fight some skeletons for the parts needed to open the town gate, and then proceed. If you do this, then reloading the game if you fail triggers the second disc's opening cut scene, and all's well. However, if you run to the area with the skeletons, then turn back around and then save the game and reload it, the enemies will vanish - along with the items you needed to collect from them. You're now stuck outside the city with no way to get through the locked gate, and with the game saved at that spot.
The first Ty The Tasmanian Tiger game could be rendered Unwinnable, if you used a particular cheat to get all the 'rangs. Somehow, this made the game think that'd you'd beaten all the bosses prior to Cass, and so Juilius and his machine would stay in the exact same spot, and would act as if you hadn't got enough Thunder Eggs (so, say you used it before beating Bull at Bli Bli Station, Juilius would stay there). This would make collecting all the Rainbow Scales impossible (seeing as one appeared every time Julius moved his machine), and would make getting 100%, impossible.

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