Introduction Super Mario Bros. 3 was developed by Nintendo EAD under director Shigeru Miyamoto and lead designer Takashi Tezuka, with development beginning right after 1986’s Super Mario Bros.: The Lost Levels and running roughly two and a half years before its Japanese release in October 1988; North America had to wait until February 1990. Miyamoto…

Introduction Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles was developed by Konami and published in North America under its Ultra Games imprint, a label Konami founded in 1988 specifically to get around Nintendo’s limits on how many titles a single publisher could release per year. The game reached the Famicom in Japan in May 1989 and the NES…

Introduction Pac-Man’s NES history is unusually tangled for such a simple game. Namco’s original 1980 arcade maze-chase design was ported to the NES more than once: Tengen, then an Atari Games subsidiary, released a licensed version in October 1988 and later an unlicensed version after a falling-out with Nintendo over cartridge lockout chips and licensing…

Introduction Tetris was originally designed and programmed in June 1984 by Soviet software engineer Alexey Pajitnov, and its Western publishing rights became the subject of a famously tangled licensing battle in the years that followed, with Andromeda Software, Mirrorsoft, Atari Games subsidiary Tengen, and Nintendo all fighting over who actually held the console rights. Tengen…

Introduction Mega Man was developed and published by Capcom, released for the Famicom in Japan in December 1987 by a small six-person team working under a project supervisor who reportedly pushed for perfection in every detail despite the tight crew size. Fresh Capcom hire Keiji Inafune, credited on the game as ‘Inafuking,’ designed and illustrated…

Introduction Contra started out as a coin-operated arcade game from Konami released in February 1987, before the studio built its own home conversion for the NES that arrived in Japan and North America in early 1988, alongside a separate set of European computer ports handled by other studios under region-specific names. Set against a near-future…

Introduction Castlevania was developed and published by Konami, first released on the Famicom Disk System in Japan in September 1986 before reaching the NES on cartridge the following year, alongside a same-premise MSX2 sibling title called Vampire Killer that shipped with different level design around the same time. Character designer Akihiko Nagata built the game…

Introduction Metroid was developed by Nintendo R&D1 under producer Gunpei Yokoi, first released for the Famicom Disk System in Japan in August 1986 before arriving on cartridge for the NES in North America the following year. The team set out to blend Super Mario Bros’s side-scrolling action with The Legend of Zelda’s open, non-linear exploration,…

Introduction Donkey Kong began as a 1981 arcade platformer built by Nintendo R&D1 under Shigeru Miyamoto, assigned by Gunpei Yokoi to rework unsold Radar Scope cabinets into something with wider appeal. The result introduced a carpenter hero originally called Jumpman, his captured love interest Pauline, and the giant ape Donkey Kong, wrapped in some of…

Introduction Super Mario Bros is a side-scrolling platform game directed by Shigeru Miyamoto and Takashi Tezuka for Nintendo’s in-house R&D4 team, released for the Famicom in Japan in September 1985 and for the NES in North America shortly after. Miyamoto had joined Nintendo as an artist and toy designer and originally pitched a game built…