Top 10 NES / Famicom Games
Games every NES and Famicom owner should play
The Nintendo Entertainment System is, by almost any measure, the most important games console ever made.
That’s not a controversial statement — it’s just history. When the NES arrived in North America in 1985, the video game industry was still recovering from the catastrophic crash of 1983. Atari’s reputation had been destroyed by a flood of low-quality titles, consumer confidence was shattered, and toy retailers had largely stopped stocking games altogether. Nintendo didn’t just sell a console — they rebuilt an entire industry from scratch, and they did it one cartridge at a time.
In Japan, of course, the hardware had launched two years earlier as the Famicom — short for Family Computer — back in July 1983. By the time it made its Western debut, Nintendo had two years of Japanese software development behind it, which is a large part of why the launch lineup was so strong. The grey and black NES looked quite different from the red and white Famicom, and cartridges weren’t interchangeable between regions, but under the hood they were essentially the same machine: a Ricoh 2A03 processor running at approximately 1.79 MHz, 2KB of RAM, and a Picture Processing Unit capable of displaying 52 colours.
What the hardware lacked in raw power, it more than compensated for with quality software. Nintendo’s first-party output during the NES era remains some of the finest game design in history, and third-party developers — Konami in particular — pushed the hardware to places Nintendo themselves hadn’t imagined.
My NES and Famicom Top 10 focuses specifically on games that were released in both the UK and North America, as well as Japan — titles that belong to a shared global heritage rather than one region alone. You might disagree with some of my choices — that’s the beauty of retro gaming, everyone has their own memories and favourites. There are obvious omissions that could fill a top 50, let alone a top 10. But these are the games that defined the platform for me, and the ones I’d put in the hands of anyone experiencing the NES for the first time.
So, blow on the cartridge, push it firmly into the slot, and settle in for my countdown of the 10 best NES and Famicom games ever made…
10 – Mega Man 2
Capcom – 1988 (Famicom) / 1989 (NES)
There is a reasonable argument that Mega Man 2 is the finest action-platformer ever made on the NES, and an equally reasonable argument that it’s one of the finest action-platformers ever made full stop. Capcom refined everything that made the first Mega Man interesting and removed almost everything that held it back, and the result was something close to perfection.
The concept was simple enough: play as the blue robot Mega Man, work your way through eight robot masters — each with their own themed stage and unique weapon — defeat the boss at the end, steal their power, and use it strategically against the bosses it works best on. The genius was in the execution. Each of the eight stages had its own distinct visual identity, its own music, and its own particular challenge, and the interconnected logic of which weapon defeated which boss gave the game a depth that kept players thinking as well as reacting.
The soundtrack, composed by Takashi Tateishi, is nothing short of legendary. The Wily Stage 1 theme — which kicks in just as the game raises its stakes — is one of the most recognisable pieces of music in gaming history. Hearing it for the first time, through the tinny speaker of a television set in the late 1980s, was genuinely spine-tingling.
Mega Man 2 is the entry point for the series, the game that cemented Capcom’s reputation on the NES, and an absolutely essential addition to any collection. It holds up today as well as it did in 1989.
9 – Castlevania
Konami – 1986 (Famicom Disk System) / 1987 (NES)
If Mega Man 2 represents the NES at its most joyful, Castlevania represents it at its most atmospheric. Konami’s gothic horror platformer cast you as Simon Belmont, a vampire hunter with a whip and very limited options, tasked with fighting through Count Dracula’s castle floor by floor. It was brutal, stylish, and dripping with dread in a way that 8-bit hardware had no right to achieve.
The level design was deliberately oppressive — platforms positioned just awkwardly enough to be genuinely threatening, enemies appearing from exactly the wrong angles, medusa heads floating in relentless patterns that punished every lapse in concentration. The knockback when you were hit was a particular cruelty: take a hit near a ledge and you’d be launched elegantly backwards into a pit. Konami knew what they were doing.
What made Castlevania more than just a hard game was its extraordinary atmosphere. The sprites were detailed and characterful — the bosses in particular, from the Grim Reaper to the enormous Frankenstein’s monster, were genuinely impressive for the hardware. And Kinuyo Yamashita’s soundtrack was remarkable: Vampire Killer, Heart of Fire, and the stage 5 theme Stalker remain celebrated by retro gamers on both sides of the Atlantic more than three decades later.
The NES release brought the game to Western audiences who’d never experienced the Famicom Disk System original, and it hit like a thunderbolt. A masterpiece of atmosphere and design.
8 – Tetris
Nintendo – 1984 (original PC) / 1989 (NES / Famicom)
Yes, I know. Tetris doesn’t technically belong to the NES the way Super Mario Bros does. It was created by Soviet programmer Alexey Pajitnov in 1984, and it spent several years bouncing around different platforms amid a legal tangle over licensing rights that became one of the great cautionary tales of the games industry. But the NES version, released by Nintendo in 1989, was for millions of players the definitive version of Tetris — the one they played for hundreds of hours, the one they still hear in their sleep.
The rules, if somehow you’ve never encountered them: seven differently shaped tetrominoes fall from the top of the screen, and you rotate and position them to form complete horizontal lines, which then disappear. The pieces fall faster as the game progresses. The game ends when the stack reaches the top. That’s it. That’s the whole game. And yet it’s one of the most compelling, one-more-go experiences ever designed, and it remains so today.
The NES version featured two gameplay modes and a two-player competitive option, and the music — a chiptune arrangement of the Russian folk song Korobeiniki that everyone now simply calls the Tetris theme — is burned into the memory of an entire generation of gamers on both sides of the Atlantic.
Some games age. Tetris doesn’t. It simply continues to be perfect.
7 – Contra
Konami – 1987 (Arcade) / 1988 (Famicom / NES)
Contra was the NES game that your parents probably didn’t want you playing, and consequently the one you wanted to play more than anything else. A relentless two-player run-and-gun shooter set in a vaguely defined jungle-and-alien-base nightmare, it asked for nothing except that you shoot everything that moved and keep moving forward.
It was also extraordinarily difficult. One hit killed you. The final stages were a gauntlet of projectiles that required near-perfect reactions. The standard game gave you three lives and allowed a modest number of continues — nowhere near enough for most players to see the credits. And so the Konami Code was born. Up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A, Start. Thirty lives. Even with thirty lives, the final stage was no pushover.
The two-player simultaneous co-op was what elevated Contra from a great game to a legendary one. Blasting through jungle stages with a friend, both of you shouting at the screen, dividing the responsibilities and inevitably getting each other killed — this was couch co-op at its peak, years before anyone had invented the phrase.
The Western NES release renamed the game Probotector in some European markets, replacing the human soldiers with robots, but the gameplay was identical. Whether you knew it as Contra, Probotector, or Gryzor — another European branding — it was one of the defining games of the NES era, and the Konami Code is now the most famous cheat code in history.
6 – Duck Hunt
Nintendo R&D1 – 1984 (Famicom) / 1985 (NES)
Duck Hunt is on this list for reasons that go beyond pure gameplay. Yes, as a game it’s simple — point the NES Zapper lightgun at the screen, shoot the ducks before they escape, don’t miss too many. That’s the entire game. It doesn’t have a story, it doesn’t have levels in the traditional sense, and it doesn’t demand much of the player beyond reasonable hand-eye coordination.
But Duck Hunt was a cultural phenomenon. It was bundled with the NES in North America — millions of people’s introduction to the console — and it demonstrated in the most immediate possible way that this grey box under the television was something genuinely different. You weren’t just pressing buttons. You were pointing a gun at the screen. In 1985, that felt like magic.
And then there was the dog. The smug, laughing dog who appeared whenever you missed, shaking with mirth at your incompetence, completely impervious to the fact that you were pointing a gun directly at him. The Duck Hunt dog became one of gaming’s first genuine characters — not because of anything particularly clever in his design, but because of the specific emotional response he provoked. Nintendo understood that making the player feel something — even mild, childish frustration — was a form of engagement all of its own.
Duck Hunt belongs on this list because it represents what the NES was about in its most distilled form: accessible, innovative, and quietly brilliant.
5 – Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!!
Nintendo – 1987 (Arcade / NES) / 1987 (Famicom, as Punch-Out!!)
One of the greatest sports games ever made on any platform — and it’s a boxing game on an 8-bit console from nearly forty years ago. That’s how good Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!! is.
You played as Little Mac, a tiny, green-trunked underdog from the Bronx working your way up through a colourful roster of increasingly eccentric opponents — Glass Joe, Bald Bull, Soda Popinski, Sandman — on the way to the championship fight against the real-life heavyweight champion of the world. Each opponent was essentially a puzzle: a unique pattern of attacks, tells, and weaknesses that had to be read, memorised, and responded to correctly. The game had more in common with a rhythm game or a memory puzzle than a traditional fighting game, and that’s precisely what made it so endlessly replayable.
The opponents were drawn with enormous character — physically exaggerated, culturally stereotyped in ways that are somewhat differently received today, but undeniably memorable. And the difficulty curve was excellent, steadily escalating through the roster until the final bout with Tyson himself, which remains one of the most terrifying cold-open boss fights in gaming history. He knocked you down with a single punch. You had three minutes to survive him.
Note for US readers: the NES version featured Mike Tyson under licence. After the licence expired, later versions replaced him with a fictional character called Mr. Dream — functionally identical, but somehow less iconic. If you’re tracking down a cartridge, the original Tyson version is the one to hunt for.
4 – The Legend of Zelda
Nintendo – 1986 (Famicom Disk System) / 1987 (NES)
The Legend of Zelda did something that almost no game before it had done: it made the player feel genuinely lost, and then made that feeling compelling rather than frustrating.
Shigeru Miyamoto designed Hyrule as an open world in an era when games were almost entirely linear. You emerged from a cave at the start of the game — armed with a wooden sword, with a ruined world stretching in every direction — and you were simply released into it. There was no tutorial. There were very few instructions. The game’s famous advice was “It’s dangerous to go alone — take this,” and it meant it literally. You could walk into a dungeon you weren’t ready for. You could miss entire sections of the game on your first playthrough. The experience was different for everyone.
This openness was revelatory. The Legend of Zelda invited exploration as a virtue in itself, hiding secrets behind bombable walls, encouraging return visits with new items, and rewarding players who approached the world with curiosity rather than haste. Second quests were unlocked after completion, and the entire game reshuffled into a harder, remixed version of itself — a remarkable concept in 1986.
The gold cartridge it came in was itself a statement. This was a game designed to be kept, returned to, and completed properly. There was a save battery inside — another relative novelty. The Legend of Zelda was an adventure in every sense of the word, and it defined a template for action-adventure games that is still being followed today.
3 – Super Mario Bros. 3
Nintendo – 1988 (Famicom) / 1990 (NES)
The greatest game on the NES, some would say — and on many days I’d agree with them. Super Mario Bros. 3 was Nintendo at the absolute peak of their creative powers, a game so overflowing with ideas, invention, and playful genius that it almost doesn’t seem fair that it was made available to children.
The original Super Mario Bros. had established the template. Super Mario Bros. 2 — which in the West was actually a reskin of a different Japanese game entirely — had expanded it in unusual directions. Super Mario Bros. 3 threw the template in the air, added a world map, a power-up inventory, hidden warp whistles, airships, giant worlds, tiny worlds, water worlds, ice worlds, a boot Mario could wear, a frog suit, a tanooki suit, and Bowser’s actual children as boss fights, and somehow made all of it feel cohesive and joyful.
The game was famously previewed in the 1989 film The Wizard — a thinly disguised Nintendo advertisement masquerading as a film about a troubled child prodigy — which meant North American audiences were aware of its existence and desperate for it long before it actually arrived. It sold over 17 million copies worldwide and remained the best-selling NES game for years. It isn’t just a great NES game. It’s a great game by any metric, on any platform, from any era.
2 – Metroid
Nintendo – 1986 (Famicom Disk System) / 1987 (NES)
Metroid is here because it did something that almost nothing else in gaming had done before it, and has rarely done as elegantly since: it made an 8-bit action game feel genuinely lonely.
You played as Samus Aran — who the game famously revealed to be a woman at the ending, a twist that landed with the force of a cultural thunderclap in 1986 — exploring the cavernous, labyrinthine corridors of the planet Zebes. There was no map. There was no guide. There was no friendly NPC to point you in the right direction. There was only the sound of your footsteps, the ambient drone of the environment, and the creeping sense that you were very small and the planet was very large.
The game’s defining mechanic was the steady expansion of your abilities. Samus began with almost nothing and gradually acquired the morphball, the ice beam, high jump boots, and eventually the terrifyingly powerful wave beam and Screw Attack. Each new ability unlocked previously inaccessible areas, rewarding players who remembered earlier dead ends and returned to them equipped with something new. This approach — now universally known as Metroidvania design — was invented here, on a Famicom cartridge in 1986, and it remains one of the most satisfying structural ideas in the medium.
The final boss, Mother Brain, is one of the great climactic set pieces of the NES era. The lead-up through the Tourian lair, with Metroids everywhere and the atmospheric intensity cranked to maximum, still holds up as one of the finest sequences Nintendo ever designed.
1 – Super Mario Bros.
Nintendo – 1983 (Arcade) / 1985 (Famicom / NES)
It was always going to be this one, wasn’t it.
Super Mario Bros. is the most important video game ever made. Not the most technically impressive, not the most narratively sophisticated, not the most complex — but the most important, in the sense that it changed everything that came after it. Nintendo’s 1985 pack-in title for the NES defined what a platform game was, established the vocabulary that an entire genre would speak for decades, and introduced a character who became the most recognisable fictional figure in gaming history.
Shigeru Miyamoto and Takashi Tezuka designed Super Mario Bros. as a tutorial in its own opening moments — the first screen, with the Goomba approaching from the right and the first mushroom waiting in the first hit block, teaches the player everything they need to know about how the game works without a single word of instruction. It is the most elegant piece of game design ever created at the NES’s 8-bit resolution, and it holds up perfectly today.
The world was vivid and joyful — the Mushroom Kingdom rendered in bright primary colours, with piranha plants and koopa shells and invincibility stars that made you briefly, ecstatically untouchable. The secrets were everywhere: warp zones, coin rooms, the cloud and underwater stages, the fire flower. Each of the eight worlds escalated the challenge whilst introducing something new, and the castle stages with their bowser fights provided a satisfying rhythm of tension and release.
The music. Even now, reading these words, the Super Mario Bros. overworld theme is probably playing in your head. Koji Kondo composed something that transcended its medium — a piece of music that requires no context to be understood, that is cheerful and propulsive and instantly recognisable to people who have never picked up a controller in their lives. It is the sound of a golden era.
Super Mario Bros. is the number one because it started everything. Without it, none of the other nine games on this list exist in the form we know them. Without it, the NES doesn’t succeed. Without it, gaming as a mainstream cultural force takes a very different shape.
It’s the greatest game on the greatest console of its generation. Forty years later, it still deserves to be.
Honourable Mentions
Ten slots is never enough for a platform this rich. Here are the titles that were desperately unlucky to miss out:
Battletoads — one of the most brutally difficult co-op games ever made. The speeder bike level alone has caused more controller-throwing incidents than possibly any other stage in NES history.
Double Dragon II: The Revenge — the finest beat-em-up on the system, with a satisfying combat system and strong two-player co-op that made it essential for anyone with a second controller.
Bionic Commando — the NES game with no jump button. The grappling hook mechanic was completely novel and brilliantly designed, and the game rewarded those willing to invest time in learning it.
Ninja Gaiden — the first console game to use cinematic cutscenes to tell its story. The gameplay was demanding and the atmosphere superb.
Excitebike — a deceptively deep racing game that included a track editor. Simple, fast, and incredibly satisfying. One of the best early NES titles.
Balloon Fight — Nintendo’s joyful take on the arcade game Joust. Two-player Balloon Trip is some of the most fun you can have on the console.
A note on Famicom vs NES
For most of the games on this list, the Famicom and NES versions are functionally identical. The hardware is the same, the gameplay is the same, and the differences are largely cosmetic — different cartridge shapes, regional title screens, occasional minor graphical tweaks.
There are exceptions. Some Famicom titles used the Famicom Disk System for additional memory or save functionality, and the NES cartridge versions were occasionally slightly different as a result. Metroid, for example, was a Famicom Disk System title originally, and the NES cartridge replaced the disk system’s save functionality with a famously long password system — the notorious long strings of letters and numbers that you had to write down carefully and re-enter next time. A small price to pay for one of the finest games the platform produced.
If you’re hunting physical cartridges, Famicom games are generally cheaper to collect than their NES equivalents — particularly for the blockbuster first-party titles — and require either a Famicom console or an adapter to play on a western NES. Well worth considering if you’re building a collection on a budget.
Disagree with my choices? Have a game that absolutely should have made the list? Let me know in the comments below — I read every single one.
