Famicom/Nintendo Entertainment System
#
10 Yard Fight
- Developer: IREM
- Release: 1985
- Notable Staff: Gunpei Yokoi - Producer
Especially notable as "the" original football game (minus the little handheld game), and marked here since it was part of the Black Box series of NES games. Was possibly the first to allow both Offensive and Defensive play
8-Bit Music Power/Final/Encore
- Release: 2016, 2017, 2025
- Notable Staff: ZUN, Zuntata members, Yuiko Keino, Keishi Yonao, everyone is very notable on these
Really included as a novelty more than anything, the 8-Bit Music Power series is an album instead of games. Each brings together a number of composers and musicians, complete with visualization and a relatively robust music player, designed for use with the Famicom sound chip. Highly recommend getting these if you can find them cheap, they're very fun and great compilations of really wonderful game composers, please look up every composer on these
A
Abadox: The Deadly Inner War アバドックス
- Developer: Natsume
- Release: 1989
- Notable Staff: Kiyohiro Sada - Composer, worked a lot with Konami in the late 80's (Bio Miracle Bokutte Upa, Contra, etc.)
One of the earliest releases from Natsume (now NatsumeAtari), apparently a tightly-quartered, relatively difficult sometimes-hz sometimes-vt shmup. I hold a lot of respect for their work, and maintain they probably created the best arcade-like experiences available on home consoles, in no small part due to their excellent audio and visuals in pretty much all of their pre-separation titles. Abadox's main theme is entering a living alien planet to destroy it from the inside, with visuals to match
Adventure Island I-IV 高橋名人の冒険縞I-IV
- Developer: Hudson (I), Now Production (II-IV)
- Release: 1986, 1991, 1992, 1994
- Notable Staff: Jun Chikuma - Composer (I) (worked heavily on Bomberman, did the excellent Bomberman Hero soundtrack), Matsushita Susumu - Artist (I) (cover artist for Famitsu, mascot designer)
Adventure Island is brutal. An infamously difficult platformer in Japan especially (though largely forgotten outside of it), featuring Hudson's forever-spokesman and really the first "gaming celebrity", Takahashi-meijin. The first one is quite literally a reskin of Sega's Wonder Boy, due to some interesting licensing deals with the development company (see also Bikkuriman World), but really finds its own identity in subsequent games. They play like a very slippery platformer, which lends to some neat jumping tricks across huge gaps and with the main weapon being an axe subject to momentum and a big arc, it really carves out its own niche, I can't think of other games that play quite like it. The most interesting thing is how heavily it forms its own feeling after I, introducing tons of mounts, and, in IV, plays more like a Metroid title, though with smaller scale sub-levels, and a multitude of items to swap between.
Air Fortress
- Developer: HAL Laboratory
- Release: 1987
- Notable Staff: Hiroaki Suga - Director, Game Designer (longtime HAL employee, also director and creator of the Eggerland/Lolo Lala series of puzzle games)
Air Fortress is a neat little momentum based adventure shooter with some shmup sections, really at its core is just a very interesting concept of a game that plays in a very unique way. All movement is based on you firing backwards to propel yourself, so shooting at enemies might move you in unintended ways, launching you into spikes or other traps. Obviously heavily inspired by Namco's Baraduke and Nintendo's Metroid, but with that unique movement tech
