Unwinnable by Mistake/Video Games


 * In a level of Kirby Super Star, there is a room you can enter only by breaking blocks on either side of the door with one of Kirby's powers. Standard issue Kirby is completely unable to move or break these blocks, so if you enter the room, clear out the baddies, but lose whatever powers you nom'd to get in (intentionally or otherwise), you won't be able to get back out. Entering and exiting the room causes the blocks to respawn (but not the enemies), and Kirby can't suck in enemies beyond physical boundaries like walls, so you're forced to hit reset. This is probably the highest level of difficulty you will see in the entire game.
 * Fairly early into Xenogears, there is a level where Fei goes by himself into a cave piloting his gear. There is a service robot he encounters, which the game gives you the option to fight and kill. This robot also sells you gear parts, which you'll probably need to survive the wave of boss battles ahead. If you save your game after killing the robot, then the upcoming battles are nearly impossible without a gameshark. And no, you can't just grind to obscene levels, that's not how Xenogears works.
 * At the end of .hack//G.U. Vol. 3, when you're inside Cubia before fighting the final boss, there is a save point. If you save there and aren't strong enough to beat the Anti-Existences and/or Cubia's Core, then you will of course die; when you die, you reload one of your save files. Thus, if your only save is at that point, you're screwed. The game does recommend that you save on a separate save file since you can't return to town, though.
 * Near the end of BioShock 2, if you have Winter Blast 2 or 3, you can freeze and shatter . If you do, then you can't leave the room because the door won't unlock . While it takes an active effort (or at least the unintentional firing of the wrong plasmid) to cause this, it is possible to mistakenly save your game while trying to reload a previous save, leaving your game Unwinnable.

Also in Bio Shock 2: if you die during a particular boss fight, the Vita-Chamber in which you respawn is on the wrong side of the door that locked you in with the boss. ""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 McKids review)"
 * Unusually for an educational game, Where in Time Is Carmen Sandiego?: Carmen's Great Chase through Time can be made unwinnable. Even though a template game (in which the player chooses which levels they want to play) is Unwinnable By Design, the game tries to make sure that the normal game is winnable. (The ship Yuri Gagarin is in conveniently waits for you and Ivan to take the Chronoskimmer out of the food locker; Carmen never seems to come to pick up the thief the player has to capture....) But they overlooked a bug in the Aztec time period. When you finish assembling the Headdress for Montezuma, you have to put it in your inventory. But if you give it to Ann Tiquity to ask what she says about it, then she'll say, "We must get this headdress back to Montezuma, before he blows his top!" and the headdress will be placed back in the inventory... where it will accidentally spawn another headdress. Now, you can still complete the level (and therefore the game) by leaving the duplicate headdress there. But if you haven't yet gotten the Carmen note (required to beat each level), then you'll have to take the duplicate headdress and put it in your inventory so you can get the note. You then walk into the throne room and are forced to give the headdress to Montezuma (he does not allow you to leave the throne room with a headdress in your inventory). But, because you accidentally duplicated the headdress, you're still stuck in the room because Ann Tiquity won't let you leave either; each time, she'll say, "We must get this headdress back to Montezuma before he blows his top!" It's unknown if it's fixed in any later versions.
 * The Game Boy Advance remake of the original Broken Sword had a couple of these because of Game Breaking Bugs. If you go to Spain before going to Syria, then it often causes a glitch which prevents you from going to Syria at all. Also, there is a part early on where you have to make a plaster cast; a glitch lets you do that without having picked up the plaster, which you need to get a key later in the game.
 * The random nature of the Item World maps in the Disgaea series can potentially produce maps that are unwinnable if you're lacking units capable of reaching the exit or the enemies on the map.
 * In Elvira II: Jaws of Cerberus, the plot-important items aren't protected. Step on a fireball trap? Good-bye spell book!
 * In the N64 game Space Station Silicon Valley, one of the game's bonus trophies was uncollectable, which made it impossible to get the Hundred Percent Completion necessary to access the game's bonus level without cheating. The game can still be won and you can still gain EVO's bonus gold costume from collecting all the bits, but the bonus level will forever be lost to non-cheaters and you'll never fill in that last percent.
 * It is very possible to make the last mission of the Shivering Isles quest unwinnable. It involved a final battle outside, and if the player character happened to be a vampire that has gone without feeding for a few days, and if it was day outside, and if the player doesn't have enough healing items, the character can die shortly after the final boss is defeated and makes a speech to the player. If you didn't save before you left Sheogorath's throne room, have fun and don't talk to real people for a few hours, as the autosave happens immediately once you're outside. Of course, this can apply to many areas in Oblivion and Shivering Isles when one is a vampire.
 * The Elder Scrolls: 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 leave 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.
 * The Void problems are due to faulty collision detection and are mostly encountered in Daggerfall. The real problem with Daggerfall is that quests are timed with penalty of failure. This includes the main quests! The most obvious example: when Queen Mother Mynisera tells you to track down a courier who has a letter, you have to wait in a city and meet the courier on a certain date. But the date as stated is wrong! And if you miss the courier, then you cannot redo the quest.
 * The NTSC version of Battletoads for the NES is just plain impossible when playing with two players simultaneously -- there's a bug in Level 11 in which Player 2's Clinger Winger never starts moving, and so the Hypno Orb runs him over every time. Since the level restarts if either player dies, this will repeat until either player runs out of lives, at which point they need to finish the level on their own if they wish to beat it. Thankfully, it was fixed in the PAL version of the game, as well as in the Sega Genesis port.
 * Many of the games in the old Action 52 compilation (for the NES and Genesis/Mega Drive) are Unwinnable because of shoddy programming. Two of them, Alfredo and Jigsaw, are also unplayable (except on a very few emulators).
 * To give you an idea of just how bad the situation with Action 52 is, the game's developers decided to include a small contest in the game. They put a secret, personalized code at the end of one of the games, Ooze, which (along with taking a photo of the game screen to show that the player did beat the game) would have made players eligible for a grand prize of $104,000. Unfortunately, there were two versions of the Action 52 cartridge. In the better-known version, "Ooze" inevitably hangs two or three levels in, making the game impossible to complete.
 * Other games with gamestopping bugs:
 * In Star Evil, the boss sometimes fails to show up; and if you beat the third boss if it happens to show up, then 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 the better-known version of the cartridge).
 * Fuzz Power has an insurmountable rock wall in Level 3.
 * Active Enterprises was trying to make the Cheetahmen into a Cash Cow Franchise. They started on a sequel to the Action52 Cheetahmen game, Cheetahmen II. They folded before they could release it, but 1500 prototype copies were discovered in a warehouse and distributed as bootlegs. It's obvious that 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 ApeMan in level 4. You can skip to levels 5 and 6 with a Game Genie, a hacked ROM, or 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.
 * Ninja Assault is another game with No Ending. After you play through the glitched-up fourth stage and defeat the glitched-up boss, the game just stops. There's a cave entrance on the boss screen, signifying that there should be more levels, but they didn't bother to program them.
 * In the 5th level of Atmos Quake, your ship randomly explodes for no reason, probably due to the glitchy collision detection, making the level unbeatable.
 * Pikmin has potential to become unwinnable. Libra is placed high atop a large cliff side in the Forest Naval. You can get it down without problems most of the time, but there is a small chance that your pikmin will misstep on their way back down, taking it and them to the abyss below. Libra won't respawn in its old spot, and you can't win the game if you save this: you need all the vital parts at least to win, let alone all the ship parts, and Libra happens to be vital.
 * The 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, then the game is unwinnable. It doesn't help that she's the default character and so, for beginning players, the most likely to die first.
 * In the original Phantasy Star, the game can easily become unwinnable near the end; if the player has the bad idea to save in this particular situation, then they will eventually want to destroy the cartridge. Upon landing in the air castle, the player must fight a particularly tough boss after a long and confusing dungeon. Afterwards, there are three ways to leave the Air Castle: the heroine's teleportation spell, a teleportation item, or a magic nut to turn your cat ally into a flying creature. But it is likely that the heroine will have ran out of MP casting her strongest spells against the boss, that the cat will have bit the dust halfway through the dungeon (rendering him unable to use the magic nut), and that the player will have forgotten to bring a teleportation item. Ten bloody hours down the drain.
 * In Phantasy Star Universe, there was a glitch in the MAG event mission at the very end. Each player has to take the warp individually to the final block and then stand at a gate which will only open when everyone is accounted for, letting everyone in to spawn the monsters and smash things up until you kill the final one. The glitch? At times, the monsters would spawn before the gate was opened. It's mostly harmless if you ignore them and take their attacks while waiting for everyone to get to the gate; but if someone kills the monsters with ranged attacks, then the monsters will stop spawning around the third wave or so, making it impossible to finish the mission.
 * In Little Big Adventure, you must break into the local museum to steal some items. The regular way of doing this involves using the Red Key Card on the back door to get to the sewers, from where you can access the room with the museum's alarm switch. Turning it on will evacuate the museum, after which you'll be able to enter it -- still from the sewers -- and take everything you need there, with the automatic robot guards as your only obstacle. However, if you're skilled enough, you can skip all this and just go through the front door, steal the items in broad daylight and escape before getting arrested. Performing such a robbery before obtaining the aforementioned Red Key Card will cause the game to assume you already have that item, which means you can no longer get it for real. Since the Card is needed to open a few more doors later on, you can't complete the game without it.
 * Monty Python's The Meaning of Life: The PC Game is a point-and-click adventure through the movie and television show as you search for the eponymous philosophical question. Unfortunately, the game has more than one occasion where you can wind up in an Unwinnable situation by doing exactly what the game has had you doing the entire time -- exploring and clicking on interesting looking junk.
 * It's nearly impossible to reach the last screen because of a fatal glitch that causes a disc swapping menu to fail to appear. As obnoxious as this is, it's almost fitting that something like this would show up in a Monty Python game. The disc swap bug CAN be worked around, but you have to know at what screen it appears to get around it, which you won't know if you aren't looking at a walkthrough.
 * "Pharaoh", the first secret level of TNT: Evilution (one of the Expansion Packs that came with Final Doom), was rendered impossible to finish because a vital key was erroneously flagged to appear only in multiplayer. id Software did not fix this bug in their distribution, and never has, and never will; but the creators of the pack, TeamTNT, quickly released a replacement PWAD allowing the key to appear in any mode, and also fixing a node-building error which prevented some enemies from appearing. Not that it's stopped people from discovering how to complete the level without it.
 * The Sonic the Hedgehog series has numerous examples.
 * The original release of Sonic Adventure had several glitches that allowed you to get stuck. You can glitch through the roof of the train station at the beginning of Tails's story, and play and finish Casinopolis before the casino area was unlocked... and find yourself 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).
 * Not necessarily. If you jump when running up the bottom set of stairs leading to the train station, you can get enough momentum to land on top of the glass tunnel (after flying for extra height) and fly back into the station.
 * Another interesting example: 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, just like in any other character's story. When you obtained the Crystal Ring determines what the text says. (For those who 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, the background art is the CG of Perfect Chaos as he looked before his final in-game design.
 * In Sonic Adventure 2 for the Sega Dreamcast, some discs had an error which made you fall through the floor. At the beginning of the last level, meaning there's no way to stop it.
 * There is a glitch in 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. Doing so prevents Tails from returning to aid you in fighting the Zone's main boss; you're stuck off the screen and out of reach until you reset the game.
 * Also, you'd better not be Super Sonic when you reach that main boss, or Tails will not appear either. A similar thing happens if you replay that level, play as Super Tails, and hit Eggman more than 8 times before he takes the battle into the skies. However, this was fixed in at least one later rerelease. (specifically, Sonic Classic Collection for the Nintendo DS)
 * Better not screw around playing Tails with the second controller in Hidden Palace, or he may not automatically get into place to fall to the bottom of the level, making it impossible to proceed.
 * In Carnival Night Zone, Sonic can get stuck in a quarter pipe's wall if the player makes him go too fast, and it's impossible to get Sonic out. The dev team evidently knew about this but didn't have time to fix it: the manual Hand Waves it by saying that they are traps that Robotnik lays to take advantage of Sonic's speed.
 * Sonic Megamix, a hack of Sonic 1 ported to the Sega CD with enhanced graphics and new level design, has a glitch in version 4.0b right at the end of Starry Night Zone Act 2 that can get you stuck in the wall. It's rather consistent if you're moving quickly, and it's a glaring problem in an otherwise wonderful hack.
 * In Harvest Moon: A Wonderful Life, ordering new machinery can render the game unplayable if the machinery arrives on the first day after a chapter change. The only way around this is to avoid ordering machinery in the last season of a chapter, since the exact date the machinery arrives is random.
 * Similarly, in the North American Harvest Moon: DS, two glitches caused both the Witch Princess and the Harvest Goddess, and only them, to be ineligible for marriage. You couldn't get the Witch Princess because the game didn't keep track of dead animals; you couldn't get the Harvest Goddess because Buckwheat Flour was on her lists but not in the game itself. Fortunately, you could still finish the game by marrying another girl. The glitches were corrected in an updated version (DS 1.1) and Harvest Moon: DS Cute. Not that you could marry them in the western translations of the latter..
 * A similar glitch happens in "Another Wonderful Life." If you woo all three of the bachelors to full hearts and experience all their heart events, then there is a random chance that you will be instantly locked with Rock. Then Rock will be the only one who will propose to you or accept the Blue Feather; Gustafa and Marlin will reject your proposal as if you still lack something, even though your hearts are all accounted for and you witnessed all their heart events. It tends to happen more if you witness Rock's heart event last, but it is not a guarantee.
 * 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.
 * There's also the issue of entering a cave accessible only during the winter and being in it when the new year starts. At least in this one, the game politely locks up.
 * I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream was edited in Germany to remove Nimdok and his scenario because the scenario was set in a concentration camp. This made it impossible to complete the game -- all five characters' 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 and see a cut scene between the Big Bad and The Dragon; and then a door would open. However, if you saved at the save point, quit, and reloaded the game, then the door would be closed when you re-started, leaving you trapped there forever. Nasty.
 * The original Mechwarrior for the PC required you to head to a specific planet to begin the sequence to beat the game. But after a certain point in time, going to the planet results in an unceremonious 'Game Over' screen. Typically, by the time you're able to build up your forces to a respectable level, it's too late.
 * As told here, Mechwarrior 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 Sub Construction, which you need to proceed to the endgame.
 * 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. Thankfully, patches keep Tasoth Commanders from showing up for research.
 * The potential for Deep Ones to appear remains through the entire game; but, because of how alien missions work, it is easy to stop their appearance by accident.
 * In UFO: Aftershock, it's very easy to render the game unwinnable by simply failing to complete the mission where the first appear (either by losing the tactical mission or letting the mission time out in the strategic mode). This mission gives you a research topic which is absolutely crucial for finishing the game and if you miss it, you won't get a second chance.
 * In Inindo for the SNES, you eventually reach a point where you must complete a Fetch Quest 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 disappears. There is no way to get another one. If you save the game before realizing that -- say, 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.
 * Baldurs Gate had a nonstandard game over in which, if you leveled accusations at the Big Bad without the evidence on your person or the person of one of your party members, then you would get called on it and hit with a flamestrike spell, against which there was no save and which 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 decay after a certain amount of time...
 * In the initial release of Baldur's gate, before the first patch came out, it was possible, though very very rare for Gorion to kill the Armored Figure during the cutscene at the beginning of the game. This caused the game to lock-up and crash. Since there is no plot immortality flag in BG 1, they instead raised the armored figure's hp to 9999 to keep him from getting killed.
 * If you start as a wizard in either Baldurs Gate or Shadows of Amn and have only 3 Constitution, then you can't win. You will die in the first in-game cutscenes because enough points of unavoidable damage are dealt to you that your pathetically low Hit Points will be gone. In game terms, this makes sense -- in the tabletop Dungeons and Dragons, if any character with a Constitution of 3 ventures out beyond a hermetically sealed clean room, then they're probably not gonna make it.
 * At one point, your entire party gets poisoned and have a week's game time to complete a quest line to obtain the only antidote. If you got in an argument and killed the antidote giver before this event started, you inevitably die a week later in a Ludicrous Gibs explosion. That is some really awesome poison.
 * Though, it's actually possible to complete the game before the week is up, so if you're good enough, you can un-screw yourself by simply rushing to the ending. You can then assume that you had the Dukes find a cure for you for stopping the Bigbad, if you need it explained why you live.
 * Using Otiluke's Resilient Sphere on NPCs (to prevent them from getting killed in battle) can sometimes break quests because their triggers can't fire properly.
 * 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, then 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.
 * Of course, by all in-universe logic, you'll have won right then because the rest of the game is about chasing and stopping him.
 * 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 then, 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, stopping the game in its tracks.
 * In the PC mystery game Sherlock Holmes and The Secret of The Silver Earring, the action takes place over the course of a few 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 the game will allow him to go ahead even if he doesn't pick up . 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 the American release of Tokyo Xtreme Racer 3, to face the last opponent and be able to finish the game, you must defeat the other 599 opponents. But one particular opponent, Whirlwind Fanfare, only appears when you have 100,000,000 CP; the maximum CP you can carry is 99,999,990. This glitch makes it impossible to beat the game without using a cheat device. All CP needed/earned was divided by 100 for the US release (to reflect dollars rather than yen), but Whirlwind Fanfare wasn't adjusted.
 * True Crime: New York City had a laundry list of randomly occurring Game Breaking Bugs that could cause certain missions or the game to become unwinnable, making Save Scumming a necessity. 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.
 * The original True Crime had a particularly bad (though rare) bug that could make the game unwinnable. Given that the game is a GTA-type, driving cars is natural. So is blowing them up. Ramming a car enough times will make it blow up. Simple enough? But certain in-game cutscenes did not make your car invincible, and the idiot drivers on the road did not stop when your car did. If your car had just enough damage and another car smashed into it during a cutscene, making it explode, then the game would continue after the cutscene on the assumption that you were dead. Add that the game saved after most cutscenes...
 * 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 inadvertently hit (which can easily happen with the mess of area effect spells available to the party by then), all other friendly tribe members will immediately turn hostile. The game will give no indication that this has happened. If this is not noticed and an earlier saved game isn't reloaded, then it is possible to slaughter the entire tribe without realising something is amiss 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, then the game is unwinnable.
 * Also in Icewind Dale, freeing the salamanders' slaves before finding and clicking the broken rope bridge to the ice giants' cave means that the only slave capable of teaching you to repair it is gone. You are now unable to get the sixth sigil required to meet the final boss.
 * Monster Rancher has a few:
 * 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. The only way to get this situation 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!
 * In Monster Rancher 3, a minor plot battle in the jungle region of Kalaragi turns into a story-stopper if you lose. Your rival, Gadamon, will (if you lose) demand that you bring her a Dodorin Fruit when next you go exploring. Fair enough, especially when another character tells you where to find them - except that when you search the spot, the game recycles the dialogue from the end of the conversation telling you how to get it, and you get nothing. Not only can you not progress in the subplot, but this brings the entire story to a halt - no other events are available. If you win, however, you progress as usual through the story. Your reward for the subplot's completion? A Dodorin Fruit.
 * The Addams Family for Game Boy. The only two levels you cannot leave by the same way you came in require items from other levels to reach their exits. When you enter The Toybox, you had better have completed the Boiler Room level to have the Hot Coal weapon; the boss in this level is immune to all other weapons from most directions. At The River, if you didn't bring the fish potion with you, your game is over even if you know the hidden route to walk from one end of the level to the other; the boss is unbeatable without that potion.
 * Two optional levels require you to have completed The River. In The Swamp, you need the Icecube item to float across the swamp sections. In Ice box, you need the icecubes to float across the freezing pools of water or the fish potion to swim across.
 * The first and second games in the Shadow of the Beast series. In addition to having exactly one life, a short (first game) or quick-draining (second game) life bar, and no way to save or continue, you can easily make the game unwinnable by screwing up puzzles and failing to collect necessary items before passing the Point of No Return.
 * The third game toned down the Nintendo Hard elements of the previous games, giving player three lives and making the action scenes much easier with emphasis on puzzles. While it was still easy to screw up the situation beyond repair, it was possible to return to the previous checkpoint by pressing the Help button on the keyboard of your Amiga.
 * As with all over day-to-day games, Night of the Comet can be rendered unwinnable if you fail to meet a certain person on a certain hour of the day, or fail to get an item at the right time. There's little hint of this.
 * The first run of Cardfighters DS was literally unwinnable thanks to a game-stopping 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 want this game, they fixed this with a second print.
 * 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 may disappear, rendering the level unwinnable.


 * 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, then 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. They should have made alerting the truck driver itself a Nonstandard 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, then 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 through 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 you are expected to fight a boss in the castle. Go through the cave again, and you're stuck in the desolate town because your airride won't come back.
 * One dungeon is filled with collapsible bridges. This is standard fare for video games; but unlike the standard Magical Self-Repair Bridge, once these collapse, they're gone forever. This leads to unwinnable situations--if you use an item or formula to escape before defeating the dungeon's mini-boss but after crossing the bridge to get to the dungeon, you'll be unable to return and thus unable to complete the dungeon. If you're unfortunate enough to save while you're outside, then 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, then the game is as good as unwinnable. Did we mention that the Verminator is That One Boss and that 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, then 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 appear after you've used that glitch, it will be impossible to initiate this code, and the player will be forced to reset. Unwinnable revenge!
 * Like the aforementioned 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.
 * There is a very strange glitch that can be used to bypass this (perhaps it was used by the developers to speed testing). If you walk to a certain point on the overworld map, your Turtle will swing the rope and begin climbing on the map. If you then enter a certain building, you can fall through a level and end up in a later part of the game.
 * Similarly, the Taito Legends 2 emulation of Nastar Warrior has a section in Level 4 that becomes impossible to advance through, as you're forced to make a jump from the top of a room, thus risking bumping into the ceiling, and (hypothetically) squeeze into a gap that is actually shorter than your character.
 * Likewise, the Commodore 64 port of Rastan has an impassible jump in the ice level.
 * In Tiny Toon Adventures: Buster Busts Loose, there's a part near the end of the second level where the game takes control away from you so that Buster can show off and stand as close as possible to the edge of the roof of a train wagon (which is next to a bottomless pit, naturally) during a Auto Scrolling Level before he dashes off and uses a convenient ramp to make it to the final part of the stage right before the screen is about to push him off the train. The problem is that the game defaults to R button being set as "dash", and if you've changed it to something else, Buster will just stand there and get killed repeatedly since you can't change controller settings in the middle of the game.
 * The Turbografx-16 version of the Nintendo Hard Impossamole had shoddily placed Points Of No Return in some levels in such a way that if you missed a Plot Coupon (scroll) beforehand, then it would be Lost Forever. Having Monty commit suicide didn't help if you crossed a reload point after the Point of No Return; the mission would be Unwinnable unless you lost all your lives and started 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. Compounding the problem, saving just an instant too early means you're stuck in a sequence of "Load game - automatically trigger scene transition - game freezes - turn off game".
 * 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 PC version, this was fixed, but there's not much in the form of in-game help, and there was no Game FAQs to look this stuff up on back then. After the third or fourth random piece of junk, most people stopped checking with Robocrook and didn't know they had to.
 * 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.
 * In Portal it is possible, if you try very hard, to accidentally lose 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.
 * In the instances of making the levels unwinnable that the developers have figured out, GLaDOS (your instructor for the game) will practically call the player an idiot, stating that it is no fault of the Enrichment Center that you have managed to trap yourself.
 * A much easier way to screw up your game completely is to fall into toxic waste and simultaneously hit one of the badly placed autosaves.
 * It is much easier to make the game unwinnable when playing the bonus maps (the harder versions of Rooms 13-18) by, say, dropping a weighted cube in the goo where it cannot be recovered. This is also played with in one of the rooms:
 * Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas had a huge Game Breaking Bug affecting a certain non-optional mission: Mad Dogg jumps to his death too early, making it and the game unfinishable. If you encounter this bug, then Begin New Game and hope it doesn't happen again.
 * This only happens if you used too many cheat codes in your save file. Fortunately there are a coupe of cheats you can use at this point to slow him down again.
 * This has been disproved - people who never cheated got the bug, and people who cheated extensively did not.
 * The worst Game Breaking Bug in all of Grand Theft Auto has to be the Purple Nines glitch in GTA 3. If you complete the D-Ice mission Rumble, it clears the existence of an entire gang. The problem occurs that once you save, the bug affects all saves so the game will never load any more Purple Nines. That makes D-Ice's first mission impossible on any future game saves, as it entails gunning down a set amount of the now non-existent Nines.
 * Grand Theft Auto IV's last mission features a jump from a bike to a helicopter. You then hang on the chopper and have to press a certain button to climb into the cockpit. Some copies are affected of being unable to get into the chopper, regardless how often you press, making this an Anti-climax.

PC-gamers have the option of changing the button in the options. Console users are still screwed; no one from Rockstar Games knows what the bug is or where it came from. They announced an update which will be probably never released.

A semi-rare bug in The Lost and Damned can lead the game to not give you any more missions after the  is finished, meaning the game story can't progress and so the game can't be finished. Nothing appears on the radar, and no amount of calling or driving around will cause a radar blip for any sort of mission to appear - the only real fix is to reload from a save, although even that might not save you. ""We're screwed! We're screwed, man!""
 * Fallout 3: like Oblivion, 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.
 * The infamous Lamplight Vault Access Bug: as the main quest progresses, you discover that a critical Vault's main door is inaccessible (That door isn't even connected to the actual Vault map). Instead, you have to get in via Little Lamplight. But THOSE accesses are blocked until you unlock the proper dialog with the proper NPCs, even if you find the NPCs independently. Fallout 3 is so open-ended that it's possible to complete the quest that unlocks one of the dialog paths before you 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, then BOTH dialog paths are pre-empted from the game as if they never existed, and 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. The only known solution is to fire up the console and use a clipping cheat to move past the barriers... It's called a bug, but it isn't. The Fallout 3 Game Guide shipped with a specific note on avoiding these situations in order to complete the quest, and so it's clear that Bethesda knew about the problem prior to shipping. It hasn't been patched, and it may never be.
 * A more standard one - load up on Rad-X, Radaway and the best hazard suit you can get, then try to get within discovery distance of the Vault itself (the place it will lead you does unlock a new place on your map). But unless you brought more than 300 Radaways (you'll need three a step even with the strongest hazard suit, Rad-X, and the radiation immunity perks, and it's 50 steps through the toxic area), you're dead. And if you set the game to quicksave when you find a new place......
 * If you happen to try to quicktravel to a less toxic area, then you'll be DOA.
 * At least one NPC in the city of Megaton will occasionally commit suicide while the player is out of town or asleep. He has a tendency to go for strolls on a difficult-to-reach roof area, and will sometimes fall and die, taking his quests and rewards with him.
 * The Pitt shipped with a bug that froze the game instantly when approaching the Downtown area.
 * This was so bad that Bethesda pulled the content from the Marketplace to fix it.
 * Fallout: New Vegas On the 360 version, if you enter Caesar's fort as an enemy, then free Benny, Caesar won't have the chip on him and Benny will take it out of the game, making the main questline unwinnable except through the NCR ending if it's still available.
 * 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... dooming you to a watery grave.
 * 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. 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, then 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.
 * 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. Many players simply give up and never play again.
 * 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.
 * Halo series: Overzealous speedrunning or Sequence Breaking can cause critical enemies (for example, 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, then you're fucked. Restart.
 * The series's autosaving also often lands players in unwinnable situations -- for example, 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.


 * In Halo 2 and onward, 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, then multiple suicides to trigger this might be a good idea.
 * Unfortunately, if you get yourself into an unwinnable situation that (if it was by Design) would be Cruel or worse, then you might live long enough for the system to autosave twice after you trigger it. The games' mercy has limits.
 * In Halo 3, at the end of the game, you have to race to the ship on a warthog while the planet ring is about to explode. There are a few different check points, most of them on the solid parts of the route. But there is one check point right before the final stretch where you can land at an odd angle, just as it is starting to collapse, and you then fall to your death below. The result is that you get stuck respawning upside down over a pit.
 * In Halo Reach's New Alexandria mission, if you stay at the top of the Sinoviet Tower to kill the Drones, then take the elevator back down (or go back up then try to return), the doors at the bottom won't open, forcing you to restart the whole mission, since the game autosaves at the top of the tower.
 * In madda cheeb adventure, a So Bad It's Good Halo game with the cheeb's poses ripped off from other places, it's impossible to beat stage one without losing a life if you have two slivers of health left; if you're 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. The second stage hints that you have to get so many mini-war hogs without getting hit once or else you will run out of time.
 * The Chip 'n Dale 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. See, in the game, being stunned and being damaged were two completely different things, and the code caused you to always become stunned instead of taking damage. The result was that if you got caught in certain areas where you were rapidly attacked or if you touched a stationary enemy, you'd be stuck. Interestingly, the Game Genie manual specifically warns you about this in the code's description.
 * 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.
 * You can just plain save while surrounded by monsters and one hit from death. This is obviously user error. Another variant is to save immediately before getting dealt a final blow such as by a projectile, which is more of an accident.
 * This can screw up first-time Diablo players who come from Diablo II. In Diablo 2, you CAN save and exit when you die and get away with it. In that game, you will be brought back to town carrying whatever was in your inventory when you died. Anything on the ground or that you dropped(potions, usually), were gone... If you're used to that, the change in save-after-death in the original can burn.
 * Multiplayer characters can screw up in a different way: there is no regular save function and dying in multiplayer mode causes your items to fall to the ground. If you die in a place where you can't get them back (there is one notable enemy type that ignores the safe radius around level entrances and is also invisible, so you can die very quickly after entering a level, only to see a mass of hidden ones manifest around the stairs) and have no choice but to leave the game, you lost all of your items permanently. Good luck completing the game after that.
 * Diablo has strong Roguelike influences and can screw you over in numerous other ways. Black Death in particular take away 1 hit point permanently on striking (with no indication that this is the case) and can render the game unwinnable if you are playing very badly and get hit hundreds of times, leaving you with a tiny amount of health. You have to try really hard to make this happen, though.
 * In Diablo II, if you lose everything, then you can still go back to where you died and pick up your body. Since it's a pain without your best weapons, you may decide to just quit the game and reload it instead. Doing this too many times causes the game to say "Bad Dead Bodies". There is no indication anywhere that this will happen.
 * Why people run into the "Bad Dead Bodies" problem: if you die multiple times, pick up your first corpse with all of your items on it, but don't have enough inventory space to equip them all, the remainder stays on your corpse. If you then die again, then your items are now split among two corpses. The game only saves the corpse with the most valuable items on it. Some useless items have a grossly inflated sales price. This may not literally make the game unwinnable, but losing almost all of your items in Hell difficulty can end your quest right there. This is considered a feature and it is the reason why most people simply quit and reload when they die once, and pick up their corpse in town.
 * 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.
 * These probably weren't so bad in the Japanese version which gave better average stat gains per level for party members.
 * In Atelier Iris 2, the item "Flay Hammer" is required to proceed at a certain point in the story. If you do not have it already, you cannot learn how to make it at this point, so the game becomes unwinnable. To be fair, it's so difficult to miss that you'd have to go out of your way to avoid having it by this point.
 * In Atelier Annie, events are triggered by entering locations; all but the final assignment, the Cosmic Conis, will be given to you even if you arrive late. The last assignment will only arrive if you leave your lab and re-enter it on a specific date, and if you don't, you'll never get it, even if (because you only have a few weeks left before the contest ends) you spend that day holed up in your lab. You have to be able to leave, and come back in, in order to trigger the event. Since there's no indication that there even is a final assignment after the last monthly one, because it's a plot event that's not part of the official contest, it's possible to play through the game several times and never know why you keep getting the bad ending.
 * In The Dark Spire, it is possible to advance the One-Winged Angel's quest line before obtaining the key item Angel's Bracelet. This causes the player to be unable to obtain the key item Black Orb, rendering the game unwinnable.
 * In the original version of 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: if Player 2 reaches the endpoint before Player 1, then 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.
 * Anyone who doesn't know how to race swoops should never play Knights of the Old Republic using autosaves alone. The game autosaves at loading screens at set intervals. It may autosave in a position where your swoop is just about to explode.
 * Knights of the Old Republic has an interesting glitch called the "galaxy droid" that gives you access to a debug menu that allows you to reach any area. If you go to areas that you should not be able to reach, then you may not be able to leave.
 * Choosing Mission to rescue you on the Leviathan can cause what's known as the Carth Glitch. If Mission is stealthed when she sets everyone free, then the game will hang during a later cutscene while Carth is talking. Carth's mouth will continue to move, but the scene will never move on. This occurs because Mission is supposed to talk after Carth but, since she's stealthed, you can't detect her. If your Awareness is high enough, then you may eventually see her and the game will then continue; but few people choose to level Awareness on the Player Character.
 * The Game Boy original version of Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back included an unwinnable situation in the first level. Near the end of the Hoth caves stage, there was a long jump that needed to be crossed, with a stack of ice blocks on the other side allowing you to reach your destination. However, the ice blocks are destroyable, meaning that if you accidentally break enough of them (particularly by riding your Tauntaun while attempting the jump--it's wait automatically breaks through ice blocks), you are stuck with no possibility of finishing the level. Possibly Unwinnable By Design.
 * In the Game Boy original Star Wars: A New Hope, you can find each of the main characters from the movie (except Chewbacca and C-3PO) and add them to your party. However, you don't need to find any of them except R2-D2. Obi-Wan Kenobi is located in the back of a cave out in the middle of nowhere, and is notable in that he provides you with the less than useful lightsaber and also has the ability to heal your party a certain number of times. However, if you left Obi-Wan to rot on Tatooine then you'll quickly regret it upon reaching the trash compactor level of the Death Star. The sewer monster from the movie is seemingly immune to your blaster, and even if it isn't the damaging water rises too quickly for you to kill it that way. The only way to get past the dianoga is with the lightsaber provided by Obi-Wan.
 * 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 two most common ways to make a game of Glider PRO unwinnable are to accidentally miss a star (backtracking is sometimes impossible) or to run out of a necessary powerup, especially helium (powerups are in limited supply, never respawn, are sometimes mutually exclusive, and can be drained all at once by microwaves).
 * There are several vents and transporters in "Slumberland" that let you skip large sections of the house. One of them lets you skip the sewers, which is a great relief except that one of the stars is down there, and there is no way to go back. It appears that this star was originally supposed to be in the room "You Got It," which is where the sewer route converges with the shortcut.
 * In the console version of The Sims 2, one of your objectives in the alien crash site is to "meet an alien". If you have previously met both of the aliens living here, it is impossible to complete the goal, which is required to progress in the game.
 * Treasure of the Rudra. A certain sidequest can be done right after a bridge gets broken. You're supposed to get on with the plot a bit first, and stumble upon the sidequest location in the process. Doing the sidequest as soon as it's available will land you on the other side of the broken bridge... with no way to get back.
 * In Desperados 2: Cooper's Revenge, there's a level with a sheriff NPC which you are not supposed to be able to kill; due to a bug, you can kill him. Speaking to this NPC triggers a mandatory scripted event. But if you kill him before talking to him, then the scripted event will never happen and the level (and thus the entire game) becomes unwinnable. The worst thing about this is that it doesn't become clear immediately; you may play for a long time wondering why nothing is happening and overwriting your save files. If you didn't have a save from before killing him, then you'll have to restart the enormously long level from the start. A published patch is supposed to fix the bug, but it doesn't.
 * The golf minigame Spheda in Dark Cloud 2 can be made unwinnable via a bug in the Randomly Generated Dungeons design: after clearing the level of enemies, the game will spawn the sphere and the "distortion" (the hole) at random, then calculate the number of strokes you can make as a function of the distance and the number of walls between one and the other. Unfortunately, sometimes the two objects would spawn close to each other, with a single wall in between... but to get there, you'd have to traverse the entire floor. The game would then give you 1 stroke to sink the ball. It's even worse when Spheda spheres will change color whenever they hit the floor, the ceiling, or a wall, so even if you can make a miraculous U-turn shot, chances are the ball won't be the right color and will bounce off the distortion.
 * Thankfully, any given level's Spheda can be replayed by beating the level again.
 * One level of Marathon 2: Durandal has a pattern buffer (save point) over a pit of acid which just so happens to be unescapable.
 * One level of the first game had a pattern buffer in a secret room with a one-shot timed door. Don't save here.
 * Some levels, such as "Colony Ship for Sale" and "Ingue Ferroque", require you to shoot switches with grenades or fusion overcharge shots. Don't have grenades or fusion batteries? You're stuck for good.
 * Some one-shot door switches, such as in G4 Sunbathing and certain game mods, can accidentally be deactivated before the door is fully open, preventing further progress.
 * Spore is one of the most merciful games out there, but in the Tribal and Civilization stages, your tribe's/civilization's fall takes you back to the last save point. If you saved at a moment where you didn't stand a chance, then you're caught in a Groundhog Day Loop of defeat. Your only recourse is to reload the creature on a new planet.
 * Half-Life 2 can be rendered unwinnable. In the museum where you have to deactivate three dark matter generators, the way to one of them goes through a room full of laser beams. As soon as you cross one, the door closes and you get mowed down by turrets. If you throw a painting from the outside corridor through the laser beams, the door locks permanently.
 * Averted in Episode 2, wher the commentary states that they designed the autosave system not save in dangerous places during the.
 * The coin-op game Trog features four cute claymation dinosaurs (Rex, Bloop, Lisa Spike, and Gwen) collecting eggs and trying to get home. It has a complex egg-laying pattern (presumably this means "sophisticated", not "driven by the square root of -1") that sometimes fails to spawn the last egg for a particular dino, making it impossible for that dino to win the round.
 * The trading/combat game Elite has one star-system, Oresrati in Galaxy 8, which is over 7 light-years from any other; hence, it is only reachable by Galactic Hyperspace (or the "unlimited hyperspace range" hack). It's of insufficient tech level to sell you another Galactic Hyperspace. If you're not using the "unlimited hyperspace range" hack and don't have a recent saved position, then you're basically screwed.
 * Overlord used to have a bug in the brewery level where, if you left the level by any means before repairing and turning a wheel that activates an elevator to the lower floor, the items needed for it would disappear. Since going down was required, this made it impossible to continue the game. The game autosaves at all level transitions; unless you had multiple saves, it would be impossible to reload. It was fixed in a patch that thankfully also restored already Unwinnable saves.
 * In the Lucas Arts game Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders, you pick up a scrap of wallpaper near the beginning, which you eventually need in order to draw a map. Some time before this, you have to light a bonfire, and can, if you choose, use the wallpaper as kindling. The game doesn't try to dissuade you, and you can continue unhampered until you realise what you were supposed to hang on to the paper for...
 * It's also possible to slide things you need into the slot at Annie's office before you have the item that motivates her to contact you; since the door doesn't open, you can't get them back, so you're screwed.
 * Call of Duty 4 has no specifically unwinnable points, but given the way the game sometimes autosaves in the middle of fights you can come pretty close.
 * Some computer versions of the classic 14-15 puzzle have an inappropriate shuffle routine (one which lays down the tiles in just any old order, instead of taking the space on a random walk through the tiles or swapping an even number of pairs of tiles, either of which procedures guarantees a solvable position) and thus generate an unsolvable position in 50% of cases.
 * Similarly, most implementations of Shanghai just lay down the tiles any old how, usually resulting in an unsolvable position. Fortunately, some (most notably Kyodai) are far more considerate of the player.
 * Champions of Norrath had this issue with a boss fight in the first chapter. To reach the Spider Queen boss, you have to bring a NPC to the door of the boss chamber. The NPC opens the door in a cutscene, and once you enter, the door locks you in for the boss fight, also done in a cutscene. Nothing too bad so far. After beating the boss, a door to chapter 2 opens and, like most bosses in the game, she drops equipment, and since there's a good chance you can't wear some it, the logical thing to do is take it and use a Gate Scroll to teleport back to town and sell it. Still not a big deal, since you can Gate Scroll back to wear you used the first one. The problem comes when you either use another Gate Scroll out of town or use the teleport pedestal to do some more adventuring. The old Gate Scroll jumping point gets deleted, so you can't Gate back, and since the door to the room opened and closed by cutscene, the player can't open the door to the room, effectively locking you out of chapter 2 permanently.
 * Some (but not all) Windows copies of Chips Challenge have a bug in Level 88 that effectively renders it unwinnable, due to increased aggressiveness of the walker enemy. This would later become known as the "Spirals corruption". Fortunately, failing a single stage enough times gives you the option to skip it.
 * Hexen version 1.0 had a bug (an error in one of the action scripts -- it checked that the number of Green Chaos Serpents left on the level had been reduced to exactly 3, instead of to the intended less than 4) that caused the Episode 4 end-of-episode boss to sometimes fail to appear, leaving the player stuck in a sealed room with no way forward or back. This was fixed in version 1.1.
 * If you choose to save in the middle of the timed final level in Donkey Kong 64, you will return to find one of the Banana Medals can't be collected. You need all the Banana Medals to see the entire ending. Before YouTube, this was one nasty glitch.
 * One of the Golden Bananas requires you to enter a mechanical fish and shoot out 3 lights surrounding its heart, which are blocked by a propeller that spins/stops on a set pattern, in a certain amount of time. This is normally a fairly easy one to get. But if you don't do it by a certain point it becomes nearly impossible to get due to a bug that makes the propeller spin longer than normal. The only way to get the banana is to exploit a glitch that allows you to hit lights that are being covered, but this is difficult to do and doesn't always work.
 * The Sega MegaDrive / Genesis game Chuck Rock had a pit in the last level. There's a rock in this pit which you can place next to the wall and climb out. If you manage to throw the rock out of the pit, then that's it. You have to restart the game from the beginning.
 * FEAR: Project Origin, unlike the earlier games in the series, doesn't allow for any manual game saving by the player. There's only an automatic checkpoint system which doesn't allow the player to revert to earlier checkpoints. If you find yourself up the creek without a paddle, then you have to restart from the beginning of the level... and some of those levels are long.
 * In The Forgotten, due to a somewhat fussy mouse control over a secret drawer, the player could end up skipping over a key required to enter a room on another floor. So when they enter the elevator, and use another key they found to release the safety so it crashes into the basement. Well Congratulations, you're missing the key item to end the game and now the elevator's broken, so you can't get back up. (Yes, there is a reason why this planned 7-part series only got the first game out)
 * One of the Dark Daxter levels in Jak and Daxter: The Lost Frontier can end up like this; no idea why, but going through an autosave point at a bad time can result in Daxter finding himself with no spiders to use to clog up holes in the ground, and not enough dark eco to smash through a wall.
 * Lucas Arts' policy was to be far more merciful than its competitor. But in The Secret of Monkey Island, it was technically possible to spend all your money in the grog machine, one coin at the time. It was also possible to burn an item you'd need later, though later versions fixed this. A guide, past knowledge or brute force using player can bypass getting a map, only to be stuck when they are required to use it as a fuse.
 * The indie adventure game Pleurghburg Dark Ages attempted to avoid all unwinnable situations; the game is never supposed to be unwinnable under any circumstances. Still, one thing slipped; if you entered the park at night without the whistle and are about to be attacked by the panther, you're stuck.
 * There is one sidequest in Dragon Age Origins in which you escort a blind templar through a building and fight a couple of demons along the way. There is a cutscene that triggers after you kill the first one, but if you get impatient and talk to the templar before it happens, you end up stuck in that room - the only two doors out are both locked and impossible to pick. Luckily, the game autosaves at the start of the area, so you won't lose much game progress by resetting.
 * Duke Nukem Manhattan Project has an odd one relating to the autosave, where repeatedly dying in a certain location constantly resaves a fraction of a second later, leading eventually to you starting over a pit and dying every time you load.
 * The Atari ST version (and possibly other platforms) of Lemmings 2: The Tribes had a situation where it was possible to be too good at the game - I managed to save an extra lemming on one level by having a fencer hit a blocker just right so that the fencer was blocked, but the blocker was still undercut and stopped blocking. When I completed the rest of the game with the intended numbers of casualties, I was left facing a message informing me that, while I had managed to get gold on every level, I had to rescue at least half each tribe for victory to count. After consulting a guide, I managed to discover that I had too many lemmings in that tribe, in which level the error had occured, and how the official solution differed from my own. Not that the "you win" screen of text was particularly rewarding when I finally unlocked it after starting a new game. It's possible that the extra lemming was coincidental, and the unwinnability came from my having earlier got gold on every level with less than half the lemmings per tribe surviving.
 * Lemmings Revolution features a glitch in one level which makes it impossible.
 * At least one level in the SNES version of the original Lemmings was impossible to beat due to the timer being too short for the larger number of lemmings (100 as opposed to 80) than other versions. The only way past is to use a password.
 * Also in the SNES version of Lemmings, there was a 2-player setting where you could work against another player to the goal. The problem was, to fit in the worker options for both players on the same screen, they omitted the "Nuke" button. Consequently, if you left a blocker up and didn't have any bombers left, then the game was unwinnable by either side, since the level would not end until all lemmings were accounted for or dead.
 * There are many, many versions of the original Colossal Cave Adventure out there. They form a convoluted family tree of ports to other platforms, ports to other programming languages, modifications to make the game more "interesting" (which may or may not work), and so on. One particular branch has a bug that makes the game unwinnable: instead of being able to "get spices," you get told "You can't be serious" if you try. Spices are one of the game's treasures. If you can't collect all the treasures, then you can't unlock the endgame. If you can't unlock the endgame, then you can't complete the endgame. If you can't complete the endgame, then you can't win the game.
 * Dragon Warrior VII can be rendered unwinnable by an unfortunate consequence of This game has relatively few examples of this despite its unique and complicated story progression; the developers (and beta testers) were good at spotting most possible instances.
 * In Blaster Master, you get a weapon upgrade for your tank which allows you to blow away certain walls, which will respawn after a couple of seconds. Should you get out of your tank and walk through a passage created when your tank blew away a wall, you will have no way to return to your tank after the wall respawns. In some places such as Stage 6, you can blast through the ceiling, but can't get out when the blocks respawn as you can't shoot downwards, and in other places you can get stuck without Hover power. There are a number of places where you also can't kill yourself, forcing you to reset the game.
 * Strife: Quest for the Sigil has a few intentional unwinnable situations, but there's one case of Unwinnable By Mistake that only shows up if the player cheats: The Front base's location is dependent on how many Sigil pieces you have. If you have even ONE sigil piece, then the Front base is moved to the castle. Problem? If you cheat to get the Sigil early, then you won't have access to the castle and won't be able to get ANY ending without further cheating because Macil, who gives you all the key jobs (except the first one) until the Front base moves, won't be accessible anymore.
 * In Lego Indiana Jones, it's possible to make a level unwinnable during certain mounted segments. Riding an elephant into a insta-death pit, for example, causes the player character to die shortly thereafter, at which point he respawns at the last "safe" point - back on top of the elephant, still in the death pit.
 * Robin Hood: Prince Of Thieves for the NES had an item, The Druid Dagger, which was required to destroy an enemy late in the game. Midway through the game, Duncan The Blind leaves the party and takes all his inventory with him. If he has the Dagger then, you will probably be unable to get it again and will get stuck just before the final fight with The Sheriff Of Nottingham.... A bug in the character system does create a one-time-only instance of a character with a random name who carries Duncan's things; but once you pass by him, the character disappears, never to be seen again.
 * The horrifically broken password system in the game (it was hidden for a reason) would put Robin in the proper place but with a different inventory which is often missing anything of value, including plot-critical items. The password that took you to the final sequence would not give you the Druid's Dagger; the game is unwinnable if you use it.
 * A third instance: a 'hidden feature' allowed rapid fire in the sword duels simply by holding down Start. If a player jumped while holding Start, then Robin Hood would not come down from his jumps, allowing him to spring through the screen vertically and eventually wrap around. It was possible to get wedged into the floor and be unable to jump any more without an apparent reason. The player would now be too low to hit the other sword fighter and too low to be hit themselves, which makes the fight a complete draw. You can't back out of the duel, and so the game has to be reset and started over from the beginning. (We did mention that the password system is messed up.)
 * The Harry Potter And The Chamber Of Secrets game autosaves when you enter the Chamber of Secrets. Problem is, you really need lots of health potions in there, and you can only get health potions by making them in school before you enter. Oh, and there's no way out once you're in.
 * Commander Keen:
 * In Commander Keen Episode I: Marooned on Mars, if you beat a level with a ship part without collecting it, you're screwed as you cannot re-enter levels in the game.
 * One level in Commander Keen IV featured monsters who didn't harm you, but appeared in puffs of smoke to steal items before you could collect them. This included a key necessary to get to the end of the level. In fairness, however, if you were unable to kill all of these monsters before they got to the key, then you deserve to lose.
 * In the Game Boy Color pirate Thunder Blast Man, an even worse port of the Famicom Rocman X, the "city stage" boss is unbeatable due to a Game Breaking Bug.
 * Unpatched versions of the original Descent have a Game Breaking Bug that makes the last boss unkillable on any difficulty level except the two easiest ones (out of five).
 * Jake Hunter Unleashed has a particularly insidious one in the last chapter. At the beginning of the case, you get an option to pick your partner from three characters: Yulia, King and Sam. Choosing Yulia makes it so you cannot access the critical "deduce" option later, thereby preventing you from finishing the case.
 * in Digital a Love Story, there is a story-stopper that can be triggered after less than three total BBS connects. Curiously, it is almost guaranteed that it will never happen on someone's first playthrough. The problem? Using a certain "fix" on your Amie causes * Emilio to stop sending messages to you. Not that big a problem, right? except that all BBS activity up until she disappears is triggered by her conversations with you, so you never get to do long distance calling.
 * Many, many amateurly programmed adventure games, especially using the RAGs developer, can have this. One example that comes to mind, is one where the person accidentally coded the ending trigger wrong, so a filler conversation would always trigger, as opposed to the actual ending. (Checks for Variable: Leaf Fairy, followed by variable: Negotiator Fairy. He coded the variable to become Negotiator Leaf Fairy, so the first part is always triggered!)
 * There is a similar example in My Bloody Fairy Tale, where you are required to gather a number of magical items and a magic code to activate a transformation spell, allowing you to get into the next area. But the magical items are used up in the spell,and the code is written on each of the items. You are not reminded of this second fact after you've found the items, and infact, you're only told by a ghost after you specifically ask about it. So if you start the ritual before reading the code, the game is unwinnable.
 * In the version of FreeCell distributed with Microsoft Windows, game 11982 out of 32000 is unwinnable.
 * Windows XP and onward extend this to 1,000,000 games. The same seed-based RNG is used, so as above, 11982 is impossible. Including that one, there are eight unwinnable deals. 146692 is the second one.
 * Taken even further, 1282 out of the first 100 million deals are unwinnable, which is one out of every 78,003.
 * The first Ratchet and Clank game: if Clank doesn't pick up the magneboots on Orxon before Ratchet gets the 02 mask on Pokitaru, you won't be able to advance to Hoven.
 * Penny Arcade made two otherwise nigh perfect games, but at one point it's possible to hit an unbeatable snag. After, you have to shock your brain back to health. The second and third levels of this mini-game feature unrotatable blocks of damaged tissue; if one of those blocks is at the edge and can't be reached, you have no choice but to quit and reload.
 * SoldierOfFortune II: In the Colombia mission, sometimes your team will get stuck on an obstacle, making it impossible for you to continue, since if you go on ahead, they will execute you.
 * Just like its remake, the original version of Baroque has voice and item lists, which have to be filled by talking to NPCs and registering items, in order to obtain 100% completion (and some bonus art). The lists can't be completed in a single game, so you have the chance to restart while keeping your database intact, in order to eventually get everything with repeated playthroughs. However, in what was clearly a design oversight, one of the voices can be missed permanently if you don't get it before registering 20 items. And restarting won't do a thing, since your game data and system data are separate. Your only option is to delete the system data and restart filling the lists from scratch. Made worse from the fact that this mistake is especially easy to meet, because the method of obtaining the voice is rather obscure (you must die three times in a row before talking with the Collector), and because 20 items are usually registered pretty quickly into the game. Good thing you don't actually need 100% completion to see the ending, but still painful for completionists. The problem was fixed in the remake, thankfully.
 * The 1997 Blade Runner PC game is unwinnable on modern computers without special measures because one encounter and one bomb are timed based on the speed of the CPU. Yes, computers are that much faster now.
 * Grim Fandango has a similar bug when you are in the elevator in the High Roller's Lounge in Rubacava. On modern computers the elevator moves too quickly to complete the puzzle, rendering the game unwinnable without patching.
 * It is also possible to leave your scythe behind at certain points, making the game unwinnable if you were to, for example, save and quit after finishing the level. Ahem.
 * The Shadowrun game on the Sega CD can end up being unwinnable as a combination of three factors: the game has only scripted battles, set points where the player characters gain experience and a highly customizable character building system. The end result of this is that it is entirely possible to build up your characters in such a way that they cannot win a mandatory battle, and the game offers no possibility of straying from the main storyline to grind.
 * You can get stuck between an NPC and a wall in Chapter 5 of Mother 3. Unfortunately, this game doesn't have the walk through NPCs workaround to get you out of there, so the only thing you can do is revert to an old save if this happens. The killer? The NPC you managed to get stuck behind is a Save Frog, meaning the last time you probably saved was right after getting stuck behind it, and due to a programming oversight, it will never move out of your way, effectively ending the game and forcing you to start over. The fan made strategy guide for the game advises that you avoid that save point completely and tough it out until you get to the next one.
 * MDickie's now-legendary biblical-era sandbox game The You Testament is very easy to make unwinnable, as discovered during a Let's Play by Something Awful regulars Chip Cheezum and General Ironicus: If you create a very, very short character and step into a pool, you can not climb out, and have to start all over again. You can see the effect in action in this video, towards the end.
 * The specifics of the Rock Band 2 star cutoffs mean that the score required to get a 5-star do not go up in direct proportion to how many notes are added - instead, the cutoffs take what is called a "base score" (every note taken at 1x, all sustains held to full) across all of the parts and multiply them by a number that increases depending on how many players (and which parts) there are. There are also two different challenges that strip overdrive from all songs in the setlist, one of which tasks you with getting five stars on every song in the setlist. Ace of Spades cannot be 5-starred with a full band unless overdrive is used. Biggest Show Ever adds Ace of Spades as an encore, strips away all overdrive phrases from the songs in the setlist, and penalizes you severely if you get a 4 star on any song in the setlist.
 * In Vampire: The Masquerade Bloodlines, it is possible through a bug that the slowing down effect of the fat Tzimisce things in the sewers of Hollywood will last for the rest of the game. That is not so much of a problem until you have to get out of a cave with a timed explosion, where it will be impossible to even get near your boat.
 * Also another bug caused the game to crash at the point where the video for said explosion is loading.
 * In some PAL copies of the first Digimon World on the PSX, there's a glitch prevents you to access to a dungeon (the NPC guarding the entrance is supposed to run away when you talk to him; with the bug, you can't talk to him) than contains two Digimon. The problem is, every Digimon you get give points to your city and, after reaching a certain number of points, the final dungeon is unlocked.
 * In addition, you can get ambushed at the home world and cornered into fighting a quite powerful bosswith a digimon that is FAR from ready to fight it. Some versions do reset this if you lose to him twice.
 * Vision is a great escape-the-room game, but some players have found themselves in an unwinnable situation after failing to pick up the desert marble (the one marble that's the easiest to overlook and the least required for puzzle-solving) before going down the elevator and finding themselves without all the marbles required to complete the final puzzle.
 * Alone in The Dark 4 had a frustrating glitch where a plot-critical item simply didn't appear. This happened way too often for the developers not to know about it. The only option was to grit your teeth and reset.
 * Medal of Honor 2010 has many bugs, some of which can induce unwinnable situations. For example, in Defend The Crash Site, you are defending a crashed helicopter from the Taliban with a minigun turret, and at a certain point, an enemy is supposed to destroy the turret with an RPG. Unfortunately, particularly in the PS 3 version, this Scripted Event sometimes fails to activate, resulting in the mission continuing indefinitely. Another one happens in Belly of the Beast, where you're supposed to cover fire for your team mates as they advance, but again, the event flag for their advance often fails to activate. The only way around these is to restart the mission from the beginning and hope you don't get screwed again, and if that (god forbid) fails, restart the whole game.
 * In Lagoon, it's possible to save virtually anywhere as long as you're not in the middle of a boss fight, even if you're about to fall down a Bottomless Pit.
 * In the first three Syphon Filter games, you can trigger a checkpoint just as you're about to be headshot or otherwise instantly killed, or triggering mission failure, trapping you in a Cycle of Hurting. Timed missions can also autosave with too little time on the clock.
 * While playing with emulators in general, nearly if not all games can be rendered Unwinnable by saving a game state in a situation that will always cause definitive Game Over (example: surrounded by enemies, with one hitpoint, no lives and no continues) with no saved battery files or backup states.
 * In Sphinx and The Cursed Mummy, the titular mummy eavesdrops on a conversation between Set and one of his henchman. Afterwards, the character is given a save point just before an open door. If you save there and then reloads the game from that save point, the door is closed with no way to open it, leaving the player trapped in the room.
 * Fable 3 has a bug that can happen if you access the menu at some areas. Instead of simply opening up a screen with options, Fable 3's "menu system" transports you to your sanctuary, then transports you back when you're done. The bug in question causes you to be transported a few inches below where you should, causing you to fall under the map forever. Worst yet? The game auto-saves every time you leave the menu, and there is no disabling it. Try to re-open the menu to get transported and find another way out? You can't. You're falling, it's an action, and the menu won't open up during actions. Ironically enough, you can open the save/load screen and walk around the save/load room, but nothing else. The game also won't allow multiple save files for a single character. In other words: got this bug at the end of the game? Tough luck.
 * One can make an unwinnable save-state in The Last Remnant, but only by deliberately doing so. Going to an area with incredibly high level monsters (compared to the current party), making them aggresive towards Rush, having them chase Rush into a corner and then saving will make the game essentially unwinnable, since upon loading there will be no way to avoid the encounter, and subsequent defeat.
 * In the iPhone version of Bookworm, you have to collect words on various lists (body parts, vegetables, pets, etc). The word "Gold" is on the "Colors" list and the "Minerals" list, but you can't collect it from "Minerals" so you can't ever complete all the lists.
 * Anne McCaffrey's Freedom had a level in which the main character had to cross through a brief hazardous area that would inflict minor damage on her in order to reach a plot critical NPC and finish the mission. Problem is, if she was at nearly zero health and had no healing items, it was impossible to get her across the area. And any other party members with more health couldn't be substituted; the NPC would only talk to the protagonist.
 * In Clock Tower: The First Fear, there is a possible hiding spot from Bobby that can either turn into Unwinnable By Design or Unwinnable By Mistake depending on the game's mood at the time. Normally, it would be Unwinnable By Design (or a chance of such, anyways) for Jennifer to climb up the shelves in the garage to evade Bobby, and further kick down the ladder she climbed to keep Bobby from climbing up after her. After you pat yourself on the back for a clever idea, you'll soon realise, oh crap, Jennifer can't jump down, and Bobby further crashes your parade by crashing through from the ceiling to impale Jennifer, who now can't run away from him, killing her. On the game's bad days, however, sometimes Jennifer can still trigger these events even if she hadn't kicked the ladder down. Worse, sometimes Bobby can crash from the ceiling immediately after, standing between you and the possibly-still-acessable ladder to climb down, and even worse, corner Jennifer by making her back up toward the left of the screen while menacingly following her. The problem comes when the game further gets confused that the boundaries that should've stopped Jennifer to the far left of the screen aren't recognized as such, so instead of have Jennifer stop to be impaled by Bobby, she continues to back away well off the screen while Bobby follows her, neither stopping to do any escaping/killing and forcing you to restart.
 * Lego Harry Potter has several of these. If you were looking for one hundred percent completion, you need all the character icons, school crests and students in peril. Good luck doing so if you exited the fat lady without grabbing everything, and then tried to reenter as any character other than a Gryffindor by mistake. The portrait glitches and permanently seals, where she will wave at you, but the option to recite the password is lost forever. Extremely annoying if you spent hours collecting every other token before realizing the glitch
 * And this isn't even the only one! There's an entire FAQ written specifically to identify and help avoid the heaps of game-breaking glitches in this game. One particular bug of note occurs in a section of the game that takes place under one of the game's classrooms where you have to go to grab some of the collectibles in the game. At the end of the hallway, a Lego dragon tosses you upwards back into the classroom -- Except, sometimes he misses the throw, at which point you are stuck permanently in that section of the game and cannot continue. If you reset the system, you "only" lose all your progress since your last save. If you instead try to circumvent this by saving, you've just hosed your save file. The game will always load in this corridor with a dragon who will not throw you, and you have to reset your game file to complete the game. Way to go, QA!
 * In Epic Mickey, ther's a glitch that can occur late in the game, activated if you ignored the machine on Skull Island. After completing Lonesome Manor and starting the quest "Oswald Needs Help", if you go to Ventureland and then back to Mean Street while that quest is active, the game will skip ahead in the story a bit. Not so bad so far, as you can continue the story like normal from this point. However, if you try to go to Ostown, the conflicting events will cause the game to permanently fade to black when you arrive. And since the game autosaves, you'll be stuck if you try to reset and reload.
 * In the Dream Forge game The Summoning, the door to the final level can only be opened if you possess 5 black and 5 white pearls. But the level before the door contains only 5 black and 4 white pearls. The only other white pearl is back near the entrance, 30 to 40 levels previous, and you cannot return there. So if you didn't pick it up, dropped it to save inventory space, or sold it, the game becomes unwinnable.
 * In the first Blood Rayne the final boss fight is a three-way battle with Juergen Wulf and Beliar that lets you save after you kill either. The problem is the Beliar has a time limit and is quite hard to damage, so if you save after killing Wulf you might find yourself without the time to aviod the auto Game Over.
 * In Sword of the Stars some scenarios require you to colonise certain systems. Unfortunately, if those systems are already owned by enemies, your bombardment of the inhabitable planet may lead to it being out of your Terraformable range when the dust clears. To the load screen!
 * In the Playstation 2 version of Spongebob SquarePants: Revenge of the Flying Dutchman, a loading glitch prevents the game from working properly.
 * In Wario Ware, in the needle-threading microgame on Mona's stage, sometimes the needle is placed too high to thread it.
 * In Wing Commander Prophecy, your carrier is equipped with Imported Alien Phlebotinum that can be destroyed by enemy torpedoes in the third Hrissith System mission. Nobody will say anything about this at the time, but when you try to fly Mission #5 ("Defend our Imported Alien Phlebotinum!"), you will lose instantly - before your fighter has even launched. (Fortunately, the "Flight History Terminal" makes Save Scumming easy.)
 * In Zoo Tycoon 2: Endangered Species, trying to adopt a Galapagos Giant Tortoise would cause the game to freeze or crash for some players. One scenario in the campaign requires the player to adopt and breed these animals. Because of this, said scenario could possibly be unwinnable for those affected.
 * In-universe example: In The Lost Crown: A Ghost-Hunting Adventure, Nanny Noah has Nigel playtest a clue-based treasure hunt she's designed for the children of Saxton. There's nothing preventing Nigel from doing so, but later in the game when the kids are supposed to play it, one of the locations they'd need to visit is locked up for the holiday, making it inaccessible and the game unwinnable.
 * Both Baten Kaitos games have the potential to become unwinnable due to a design oversight; in both games, it's possible to trap yourself someplace where you can't level up. In the first game, you can trap yourself on the battleship Goldoba; if you're underleveled, you can't beat Those Three Bosses Giacomo, Folon, and Ayme. You can't leave the Goldoba until you've defeated them, and thanks to the game's unconventional leveling system, you can't access the church to level up from the airship. In the second, the Holoholobird attacks after a disk swap and a temporary Point of No Return, which will trap you in the Holoholo Jungle with no place to level up. Keep backup saves!
 * In defense of the first game, Kalas at least warns you that you're not coming back to Mintaka for a while once you get on the Goldoba. The second game, however, has no excuse.
 * The launch version of NCAA Football 12 somehow managed to omit Boston College vs. Virginia Tech off the playing schedule. However, the game's back end recognizes that it is there, and simulates the game without the player's input when you advance the weeks. Since even a single loss can put a team out of the running for a national championship and injures are FAR more common in simulated games, players can easily lose the game and be eliminated from title contention through no fault of their own. Or, they could win the game but lose several star players, which can have the same effect overall.
 * Unfair difficulty in the first Soldier of Fortune doesn't allow manual saving or multiple saves, so if you find yourself in a no-win situation (too little health and/or ammo, or the wrong weapons), you have to start the whole game over.
 * In their defense, it is called "unfair". It's supposed to be played by good enough players to avoid finding themselves in the wrong situation; if you aren't, it's your own damn fault.
 * Nethack 3.4.3 (the latest version for several years as of this writing) has bug C343-424, which can render one of the Plot Coupons permanently unusable if you do the exact wrong thing with it. It's slated to be fixed in the next update (along with hundreds of other, less breaking bugs), but we're not sure when that will be.
 * This was a problem in the Fist of Guthix minigame in Runescape. Just like the rest of the game, players can only right click to attack other players that have a higher combat level. Because of this, all the hunted players would gather on one spot in the center and stack on top of each other. The lower levelled player would thus be presented with a large list of "Trade," Follow," and "Walk here" when he right clicked, and the option to attack his opponent would be pushed off the screen, making it impossible to click. As a result, a higher levelled player would acquire a large amount of charges that is nearly impossible for the lower levelled player to get. This happens less frequently nowadays due to fewer players in the game and an update to the right click menu.
 * Fahrenheit (Indigo Prophecy in the US) is a game that relies on a Simmon Says gameplay. Towards the last half, there is a timing bug in the PC version (and sometimes the PS 2 versions) of the game that will cause you to always fail, making it impossible to continue the story.
 * In games with locked doors that are opened by Scripted Event flags, notably FPS's such as Quake 4, the game occasionally glitches out and fails to register the event, leaving you stuck.
 * In Minecraft, in order to reach The End dimension, you need to activate the end portal, found in Strongholds, which only spawn 3 times per world. Generation bugs can cause the portals to be incomplete, and if all 3 portals are incomplete, you're screwed.
 * Before the hunger bar was introduced, there's a possibility of getting stuck in a 2 block deep hole in Bedrock. Normally, if you have a supply of blocks this wouldn't be a real problem since you could create a platform under you to escape. However, if you for some reason fell into this hole without any blocks, you better hope there's an enemy mob nearby that can kill you because there's no way you can respawn without death and Bedrock is indestructable.
 * In Super Star Force, stopping the fountain in DA 0820 before completing the dungeon in DA 0001 makes the latter impossible.
 * Left 4 Dead 2 has The Passing campaign and a Scavenge Mode where the objective is to fill up a generator with cans of gasoline. Naturally, Valve made it where the cans respawn if they are destroyed. However, if a dropped gas can is near a Boomer that explodes, the can goes sailing high into the air, so it is possible that the flying can may land on a rooftop or some other structure that the survivors can't retrieve it from. Unless you have a molotov to hurl to the lost can to destroy it so it respawns in its original place, the game can't be finished. Luckily, this can rarely happen since the direction of an item that gets thrown from an explosion is pretty random. Dead Center's finale has the same gas can objective as well, but it takes place indoors and the survivors are able to access most of the map, so losing a can here is nearly impossible.
 * The Thing has a stage where the player descends a long staircase (similar to the staircase sequence in Metal Gear Solid), and has to deal with automatic turrets on every level (that can take up to five grenade hits to destroy), scalding steam vents, seemingly endless streams of scuttling creatures that pop out of dead bodies (and attack you from front and behind), and the medic, the only hope of surviving the stage, turns into a monster at random points. If the player doesn't have enough health packs, or enough firepower, it's impossible to get through the stage.
 * In Dynamite Headdy, if you are on the top-right corner of the screen after you defeat Baby Face, and you skip the tally screen as fast as possible, Headdy may not have enough time to get to his spot, and if the tallies are gone before he gets there, the game will lock up. Here is a video.
 * There's also a way to lock the game if you land the final blow on Clothes Encounters off-screen, with the Super Head. But if you wait for around 4 minutes, it'll eventually return to normal. Video here.
 * Virtual Corporation, an old PC game played via voice, will throw you out a window if you get too stressed. The only way to lower stress is to go on vacation. The problem comes where the only two vacations you'll be able to afford, the skiing and wind surfing, have QTE that no key can get past. If you don't complete it, your stress doesn't go down. Luckily, it's simple enough to go into your save file, find the stress value, and lower it, only buying automated vacations for the rest of the game.
 * In the original Just Cause the second-to-last mission involves chasing something down and destroying it in a super-fast jet. Some people assume the jet will be useless after this mission and feel free to bail out of their jet as soon as said target is destroyed. The game will then autosave while you're in freefall or parachuting to safety, and you will find out quickly that you needed that jet for the next mission. At best, the jet will be just out of reach of your grapple and zoom away into the distance without you. If you're unlucky, it smashes into the ground in a fireball. You then have no choice but to start the game again, as during these final missions you can't go into free roam and access the mission again that way.
 * In Crystal Caves 3, one of the levels in The Hub is located down a deep pit, too deep to jump out. If you drop down into the pit before completing all the other levels, you're stuck. Thankfully, it is possible to leave via cheat codes.
 * A chase sequence in Mass Effect 3 is unwinnable if Shepard deployed with a Scorpion or Paladin pistol because those guns lack either the damage or rate of fire to take down the target in time.
 * Grandia II: In the first battle against Millenia (a Hopeless Boss Fight), the battle is scripted to end when Millenia casts her Zap! spell. She can get caught in an AI loop that causes her to never use Zap!, and it's impossible to end the battle in any other way (her HP doesn't decrease, and you can't escape the battle).
 * In chapter 16 of Fire Emblem: Blazing Sword, you have allied soldiers fighting by your side. However, if any of them were still alive by the time you beat the boss, an allied soldier might end up occupying the throne before you could have your Lord seize it. Because of the nature of the AI, they wouldn't move from the throne to make way for the Lord. You also couldn't kill them, essentially making the level unwinnable.

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