The Nintendo Entertainment System, or the Famicom in Japan, is the earliest console I have any direct experience of. We didn’t have a NES in our house when we were kids. I was a bit sniffy of it actually, viewing it as old-fashioned and before my time (I was born in 1984, between the Japanese and Western releases of the system). It was years later that I started to appreciate earlier games and hardware. I played the NES round friends’ houses and, eventually, well into adulthood, someone decided to get rid of theirs and now we had our own Family Computer.
Early NES games were simple affairs, usually ports of arcade titles both from Nintendo itself and other producers. With the arrival of the iconic Super Mario Bros., they started to become deeper and more elaborate. Yet there’s something appealing in being able to boot up a quick, straightforward game for a short playtime. I surprised myself in including a lot of scrolling shoot-em-ups in this list, something the NES was pretty good at, if not well known for.
Sadly, it’s difficult to play the NES today. My TV is too modern to work with it, and even if I could get it to feed correctly, there’s no way the Zapper light gun would work on a modern screen. Still, there are plenty of ways to play NES games today, either by legal means or otherwise. As before, I’ll include an availability note for each of my favourites below. As always, it’s the original release date I’ve noted, regardless of which territory that was in. I’ve also included the Japanese titles for these games, just because some of them are distinctly different to their English titles and I love a bit of trivia.
