Somewhere in a rec room in 1985, a kid feeds a gray cartridge into a top-loading NES, flips the power switch, and waits through a
You beat Mega Man 2. You felt unstoppable. Then you popped Mega Man 3 into the console expecting more of the same triumphant blue-bomber action,
Ask anyone who owned an NES in 1988 what game turned polite living rooms into actual brawls, and there’s a good chance they say Blades
Two controllers, one console, and a screen that filled with bullets faster than either of you could track. That was Life Force on a good
You rented Tetris the summer everyone rented Tetris. The video store’s copy was gone by Friday afternoon, so you drove to the mom-and-pop shop two
You rented Shadowgate expecting another action game, because in 1989 that’s what an NES cartridge was supposed to be. Ten minutes in, your torch burned
You rent Castlevania III from the video store on a Friday night, still sore from getting wrecked by Simon’s Quest a year earlier. The cartridge
Pull an NES cartridge library out of a closet and Crystalis usually turns up somewhere in the middle, wedged between a Contra and a Double
December 1987. You’re standing in front of a wall of NES boxes, and one of them has a guy on the cover who looks like
Picture a theater in the summer of 1989. The lights are down for The Wizard, a mostly forgettable road-trip movie about a kid who wants