Many, many,
many of the 80's games were extremely hard (which is why the whole trope of "
Nintendo Hard" exists in the first place.) Thus there's nothing notable in listing a myriad of extraordinarily difficult games from those times.
Nowadays some indie games are "Nintendo Hard" on purpose. It's their main shtick. They are difficult purely for the sake of being difficult, and little else, and the (intended) challenge is to overcome the ridiculous difficulty. These games seldom have anything else interesting in them (and even the challenge itself usually becomes boring really quick.)
A more interesting topic would be games that are really hard, but also really good otherwise. Something that a casual gamer could not stand for 10 minutes, but a HC gamer gets hooked. Not because of the difficulty, but because of the game just being so damn good. It's not easy to integrate great difficulty into a game in a way that works, but it's doable with enough talent.
One game comes immediately to mind:
Dark Souls. This is precisely the game that's so difficult that a casual gamer will not play it for more than ten minutes, yet a HC gamer can get completely hooked. You are going to die,
a lot, and dying is not just a minor issue (because you can lose everything you have worked so hard to obtain for the last half an hour of play) and can become really frustrating, but the game is just so well done that it's really rewarding when you finally make progress.
To be honest, though, after something like 40 hours of gameplay it got so frustrating that I stopped playing, especially after it dawned on me that I had been wasting a significant powerup (which appears in the entire game half a dozen times, as is gone forever when you use it) by using it in the wrong way, only because you can, and because its description is misleading. Because I didn't get even a single such powerup, the game is now even more difficult than it already was.
