I think anyone who says they've beat it is a dirty filthy liar. It cannot be bested.

And I'm with you, the one chance to point your jump in the right direction was INFURIATING.

As the author of the article notes, the NES was not popular in the UK or Europe as a whole, and indeed, I've still never seen one in the flesh, so to speak.

But we did have arcades in the town I grew up in, and when Ghosts n' Goblins was current, I can remember discussing it with another kid in our schoolyard. He told me that someone he knew had made it all the way to the end of the game. Totally agog, I asked what happened when you completed it, and he told me, "There's a message that says, "This was all an illusion created by Satan." And then you have to do it all over again."

I was privately skeptical that this could be true, because I couldn't believe that the programmers would be that mean, but also because the game was so bloody difficult. I didn't believe that anyone actually could make it all the way through, unless they had a six foot-high pile of ten pence pieces.

But about fifteen years later, I discovered MAME and ROM repositories, and with the aid of its cheat system, I pushed through to the bitter end of Ghosts n' Goblins. And damned if I wasn't rewarded with the message, "This was all an illusion created by Satan."

Tokuro Fujiwara, j'accuse.