Monday (July 15) was the anniversary of the Japanese company’s first system, the Famicon or NES. Its release in the US was crippled by the videogame crash that took place after a flood of crappy Atari games. Arcades weren’t seriously affected, mainly home systems.
Buzzfeed has a list of what they consider Nintendo’s biggest hits on a year-by-year basis.
I think this transcript from On the Media is more interesting. It covers how Nintendo endured during the crash and pulled the home-console market out of the ashes. I remember those years in the late Eighties quite well. The NES dominated. Consoles have never receded from households yet.
If you had the NES, not SNES or any of the others which followed, what was your favorite game? I have to go with Super Mario Brothers 2. My girlfriend Carrie got it for me as a 21st birthday present. The game was really different from many others at the time. No score, each character had his/her own strengths/weaknesses and worked more like a story and puzzle. I feel it was the beginning of the really compelling narrative-based games we have today such as Tomb Raider, Far Cry, etc. SMB2 was linear but it was just as immersive or maybe the more accurate word is addictive.