Uploaded August 2020 | Updated September 2026, 3 weeks ago

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Full, no-death run of the infamous Silver Surfer for the NES. This was played on real hardware, with a turbo/autofire controller. My final score was 776,850 points.




Stage Listing
00:00 - Start
00:45 - Mephisto Section 1
02:55 - Mephisto Section 2
04:22 - Mephisto Section 3
04:58 - Firelord Section 1
06:37 - Firelord Section 2
09:15 - Firelord Section 3
10:09 - Reptyl Section 1
13:03 - Reptyl Section 2
15:04 - Reptyl Section 3
15:52 - Possessor Section 1
18:17 - Possessor Section 2
20:14 - Possessor Section 3
21:09 - Emperor Section 1
22:43 - Emperor Section 2
24:58 - Emperor Section 3
26:00 - Magik Domain Section 1
28:04 - Magik Domain Section 2
29:59 - Magik Domain Section 3
31:22 - Final Boss + Ending


Silver Surfer is one of those games that has a reputation of just being impossible, with it's enormous hitboxs, hard to see bullets, and enemies with seemingly random behavior. Well I'm here to say that most of it's reputation as "hardest game ever" is massively overstated. Well, with one caveat: you must use turbo/autofire for this game to be enjoyable! Without autofire, the game becomes extremely tedious and painful with the amount of button mashing required.



There is actually very little true randomness in Silver Sufer. In fact, only one such part in the entire game posses a significant problem for beating it without dying (see 03:51), where the "hands" that reach out have random behavior and can easily kill you. Beyond that one section of the game, everything is pretty much doable with a bit of practice and memorization of the stages.


One thing to keep in mind is that you do have bombs in this game (the B items), so make sure to use them by pressing select when too many enemies or formations you aren't sure about show up. I feel like this is a very overlooked part of the game, but they actually can be pretty useful in certain sections.