World's Hardest Game 1, 2 and 3: What Changed Between the Versions

All three World's Hardest Game titles are on this site, and they are more different than the shared name suggests. The original is the one the title usually means; the sequels add mechanics that change how you plan a level.

World's Hardest Game (version 1.0, 2008)

Snubby Land's original: 30 levels, arrow keys, blue circles on fixed loops, yellow coins, green checkpoints, and a death counter. There is no save, no level select and no tutorial, just a one-paragraph instructions page. That austerity is why it works in a classroom: a run is a single sitting from level 1, and the only progress that matters is the number in the corner. It is the hero game on this site's home page.

World's Hardest Game 2 (version 2.0, 2008)

The sequel keeps the square and the circles and grows to 50 levels. The menu adds a tutorial, a highscore table and a tips-and-tricks page, and the enemy patterns stop being simple bounces: circles orbit, follow tracks and change speed along the route, so watching one pass is no longer always enough. It opens with a short animated intro that you can skip with the button in the corner. It runs here through Ruffle, a Flash player written for the browser, so it takes about 20 seconds to load on a school laptop before the BEGIN button appears.

World's Hardest Game 3

The third game, credited to Stephen Critoph, is not a Flash movie: it is a rebuild in plain JavaScript, so it loads instantly. It has 48 levels and adds coloured keys and matching doors, so a level can require a detour to a key before the route to the exit opens. The menu screen is itself a small live level. Because it saves, the title screen offers CONTINUE as well as NEW GAME, and there is a level select, so it is the one to pick if you want to practise a single level rather than replay from the start.

Which one first?

• Never played it: the original. Thirty levels teaches everything the sequels assume.
• Finished the original: the second game. Fifty levels of patterns that change speed are the next skill.
• Ten minutes at a time: the third. Its save and level select mean a short session is not wasted.

One thing that does not change

In all three the death counter is the score and nothing else is. A slow, watched run with three deaths beats a fast run with thirty every time, and the games are built to punish players who forget that.