NES Works

We start at the beginning of the NES's life in Oct. 1985, with what I have arbitrarily pegged as the "first" NES release. Of all the games released alongside the NES at launch, Baseball appeared earliest in Japan, so it's the oldest of Nintendo's U.S. launch titles. It definitely feels its age, but it's not a bad game... merely one that's been surpassed by 30-plus years of countless developers working within a fixed rule set and doing their best to create the ultimate virtual expression of the sport. Despite its simplicity, there's plenty to say about Baseball...

Good Nintentions isn't just a survey of the NES; it's meant to be a history lesson that helps contextualize the place of these old game releases in the evolution of the medium. So while Tennis is not the kind of game that causes people to tear up with nostalgia 30 years later, it nevertheless holds a place of distinction in gaming history, as outlined here.

Here we have the first NES release that wasn't based on a sport... yet it's hardly a bastion of creativity. By 1984, when Pinball debuted on Famicom, pinball had established itself as one of the most popular subjects for video games. Pinball stood apart, though, due to its remarkable quality... thanks in large part to a pinch-hit assist from future Nintendo president Satoru Iwata.

A look back at Nintendo's Wild Gunman, the first-ever NES light gun game, and a shooter whose simple design belies its remarkable heritage. Best known in the U.S. for its faked-up cameo in Back to the Future Part II, Wild Gunman was to Japanese fans at the time the latest entry in a line of product evolution that stretched back more than a decade. Both Florent Georges' book The History of Nintendo 1889-1980 and the Before Mario blog (www.beforemario.com) were invaluable resources as I researched this retrospective. Be sure to check them out!

The game that convinced Nintendo that, yeah, bringing the NES to America would be a good idea arrives at last: Duck Hunt, the iconic shooting game. It's simplistic and goofy by today's standards, but Duck Hunt didn't succeed despite those traits... it succeeded BECAUSE of them. An intuitive, whimsical, dynamic shooting game that remains a beloved classic even now—and for good reason!

We continue our journey through Nintendo's October 1985 NES lineup with the first release that had notable impact on the rest of the industry: Golf. The most widely played and distributed golf sim to debut in 1984 (in Japan), Nintendo's take on the sport codified a number of elements that would become standard for the genre, most notably the swing power meter. It's 30 years old, but it's still a pretty fun take on the sport!

There's not a lot to say about 1985's third and final NES light gun shooter, so after a brief look into Hogan's Alley this episode digs a bit into how the sausage is made — both in terms of how the NES Zapper worked, and what it takes to get the best possible footage of its games.

Pac-Man? Everybody loves that guy! Nintendo loved Pac-Man so much it made two games just like it, and this episode looks at the pair: Both Clu Clu Land and its import-only sibling, Devil World. Their similarities and differences speak volumes about the game company Nintendo was shaping up to be.

Skipping a bit out of sequence for this one, as we jump ahead in the NES chronology to perhaps the most fascinating game to arrive in the U.S. in October 1985. Gyromite may not have been influential the way Super Mario Bros. would be, but it played an essential cornerstone role in Nintendo's eventual conquest of the U.S. And, believe it or not, when you play the game the way it was designed to be experienced — with a complete R.O.B. setup — it can be surprisingly entertaining.

Gyromite's companion release constitutes the only other game ever officially designed for R.O.B.... and, frankly, we'd all have been better off if R.O.B.'s library had begun and ended with Gyromite. Seemingly rushed to production (the game evidently hit Japanese store shelves a mere month after completion), Stack-Up makes poor use of R.O.B, of the NES, and of players' time and money. At least the music is catchy.

Designed by Shigeru Miyamoto, this motocross game is anything but your typical racer — with its side-scrolling design and emphasis on physics and jumps, it feels almost like a rough draft for Super Mario Bros. Ah, but there's a dark and terrible secret lurking in Excitebike, hidden just off the main menu... a sign of just how much Nintendo was making up the NES launch as they went along.

This cooperative platformer occupies a somewhat unfortunate place in history: It attempted to build on the concepts of the original Mario Bros., but it arrived just before Super Mario Bros. set a new standard for run-and-jump action. It's an amusing and quirky game, but its awkward controls leave it completely overshadowed by the masterpiece that was to come.

Mario's final outing before his first adventure in the Mushroom Kingdom has little to do with any other game he ever starred in, and yet feels very much like an evolutionary step in the character's development.

The very first third-party release for NES... mostly. Developed by Irem, based on an Irem arcade game, yet published by Nintendo in both Japan and the U.S., Kung-Fu is something of an edge case. Whatever the case, though, it sure did look awesome back in 1985, with its bold graphics and proto-fighting-game mechanics.

The NES gets its very first rendition of American football — and on launch day, too! All thanks to Irem, who provide the second third-party Black Box title with this conversion of the arcade game by the same title. It's not a straight port, though, adding an entirely new aspect to the game, as well as a multiplayer mode.

This is it: Super Mario Bros. Everything about Good Nintentions 1985 has been leading up to this grand, climactic moment, the generational leap that justified the NES and set it apart from everything that had come before. Also, it's a pretty rad game in its own right, let's not forget that. Alas, at a mere 23 minutes long, this video doesn't begin to do the game proper justice.