I'm trying to avoid playing hard games because they usually make me mad enough to hit the keyboard, but probably the hardest game I've played till now was Jagged Alliance 2: UB - that was the same case I've mentioned

obviously did not finish the game

The only thing hard about that game was not blowing your brains out after realizing you actually paid money for it.

True that!

I'm surprised no flight simulators have been mentioned yet. I vaguely remember a game that I think was tied to the Alien franchise where the first mission was to land the colonial marines and all I kept doing was crashing in spectacular fashion. I gave up afetr about ten minutes. In the immortal words of Private Hudson, "Game over, man."

I've beaten two of the games on that list. QWOP & Shadowgate. They were not "that" hard. I've played games that were harder for all the right reasons, and games that were harder for all the wrong reasons

Avalon Hill's UNDER FIRE! was made in 1985

Avalon Hill's Under Fire Title Screen

E.T. was a decent game, similar to Haunted House in game play and certainly more complex than Maze Craze. Some games on the Atari would have extended game play value (Pac Man, Missile Command, anything that starting repeating the levels at faster speeds) , but some game lose their appeal/replay value fairly quick (BarnStorming, Stampede, Dodge 'Em, Raiders of the Lost Ark) E.T. might fall toward the second group of games, but it was good enough at the time. Don't mistake that they made millions of more copies of the game then there were consoles to play them on as proof that the game was bad, that is bad management nothing more.

E.T. was one of the best selling games for the Atari 2600, and I think you are letting the media buzz about the dumping of all those carts influence you impression of the game itself.

People seem to have forgotten about World Quester 2 ;)

Maybe.
Maybe not.

Check out #1 on here. :D

http://www.gamesradar.com/worst-games-all-time/

I agree with most of what has already been posted. I'm proud to say that I killed most of the bosses in IWBTG, I want to say I killed all of them but it was a long time ago and when I think about it the rage takes over - I know I at least went most of the way though.

Super Meat Boy was quite frustrating as well. I haven't got 100% completion on that yet and I don't think I'll ever finish off the few dark world levels I have left, though I will give it a go when I get a controller as the keyboard controls I used to finish the 'normal' game aren't ideal.

I will say though, that even though it may not be considered hard in the normal sense, King's Quest II and that bastard bridge still haunts me.
I can't really speak for Dark Souls as I'm yet to pick it up but Demon Souls I actually thought was quite tough to finish, at least without resorting to strategy guides. I went for the plat trophy and it felt really satisfying to do so, even if it was a bit of a grind.

The article talks about the '83 crash, it was business practices not the quality of that game that caused the crash.
It talks about the dumping, if you make millions of copies more than systems what did they really expect to happen.
It talks about awful licensed games, this starting the precedent, I say look at Raiders of the Lost Ark, it hard to under stand the scoring(how close is my ladder to the ark, is that as close as it goes), it has an end (reducing replay value), you need the manual and knowledge of the movie to make any sense of that game. And it came out first so it set the precedent.
The game was easy to understand, build the machine to phone home and get on the ship just like the movie. Maybe you have to read the manual to understand the game, but you did with a lot of atari games.

Classic!

The hardest games I have played would be pretty much any Cave game, Darius Gaiden (Trust me when I say that game is pretty damn hard), Gradius III Arcade Version (SNES pales in comparison for difficulty, which is oddly enough a positive), Contra: Shattered Soldier, Final Fight, and F-Zero GX.

It is a challenging game, but not really hard enough to start getting on the HARDEST EVER lists. It's just not that hard in the grand scheme of games. The fact that you're getting satisfaction from progressing instead of thanking the gods that you won't have to play through it ever again shows a lot. It could be one of the hardest games ever if we just forget all the generations of games that came before Dark Souls, if we're just looking at these days, then yeah Dark Souls/Demon Souls would be amongst the champions of difficulty.

It is a bit harder than Dark Souls, though, but both are great games.

EDIT: When you do get Dark Souls and get to Bed of Chaos, just look at a guide. That boss has the shittiest design in the game, devs admitted it. Not worth getting worked over.

Yup. Pretty average difficulty games in which you can't save and which have deliberately terrible checkpoint placement no less.