Sometime in the totally tubular time of the mid 1990s, my uncle gave me an NES with a handful of games. Even though the 16-bit era was entering its twilight years and the big boom of the 3D revolution was just on the horizon, I was playing the life out of that gray box every single day, and at every opportunity I could. There’s an innocent, charming simplicity to games of that era that has never been achieved since – the NES was fun, plain and simple. Long story short: my formative years shaped me into a Nintendo nut.
Sadly, my poor, rickety hand-me-down NES kicked the bucket eventually… but it was just in time for the Nintendo 64 to saunter in and take its place as top dog in my life. As the years went on I followed Nintendo down whatever bizarre path they decided to beat next (as well as swearing fealty to Sony, because the PS2 is good as shit), but my mind never wandered far from those 8-bit glory days.
Fast forward to now. Even though we have the latest, greatest consoles in the house (and they’re fun too, don’t get me wrong), I always find myself being drawn back to the Nintendo Entertainment System, like some kind of dusty ass moth to a near forty year old flame. Those big-budget flavour of the month titles would lose their luster after a few weeks, while oldies kept me coming back for more.
In my spare time, when I’ve not been playing NES games, I ravenously read anything and everything I can about this console for fun. Yes, really. If you’re not the kind of person who likes researching old as dirt video games for kicks it may be hard to believe, but the NES has lead me down a lot of interesting Wikipedia rabbit holes, as well as stumbling upon old internet forums where people adored the console and discuss every aspect of it. It was in places like that, that I started to read about individuals who had completed (or had come very close to completing) every single game in the NES library – for the games that were released in North America alone, that’s 677! It boggled my mind, and excited me like crazy to think of the time, effort and dedication that must have gone into such projects… and it made me want to embark on one of my own. Oh no!
There are long-standing classics on this machine that will never fall out of the public eye (like the Mario Bros. games), as well as so many untold stories and forgotten gems that have been lost in the shuffle of time moving forward that deserve to be remembered again. There’s also some middling mediocrity and straight-up flaming hot garbage level stuff on the NES, and I intend to beat every last one of the diamonds in the rough and dumpster fires alike.
Before starting this blog, I had finished 70 NES games and 18 Famicom games. I’ve got a decent chunk of this library under my belt, so I know what I’m getting into (or at least that’s what I’m going to tell myself). Now here I am, undertaking something absolutely gargantuan that I’ve been itching to for quite some time now; beat the entire NTSC NES library, highs and lows alike, and chronicle my journey every step of the way! I’ll be reviewing every NES game I play, as well as offering some hot tips and tricks to help those who may stumble upon here because they’re desperate to finish this or that title in the current year we live in, too. There are dozens of us out there. Dozens! On top of all that, I’ll look into each game’s history to try and find some interesting anecdotes, as well as dabble in some European and Japanese import stuff, because there’s a lot of rad things out there. Try and hold your applause, please.
That’s about it. Thanks for reading – now go play some NES!
NESJunk 