A couple of weekends ago, I got to take home the Nerdist office’s highly sought-after NES Classic Edition. To say nothing of the fervor Nintendo has created by not offering stores enough sets (usually less than ten per store!) and driving consumer demand sky-high prior to the holiday season, the very affordable nostalgia trip is a great grab if you can get it. I dove in to games I remember playing as a kid — like the three originals Super Mario Bros, Mega Man 2, and The Legend of Zelda — as well as quite a few I never played at the time — Kirby’s Adventure and Castlevania.
But it hit me — why don’t I remember playing the bulk of these games? The reason is simple: I didn’t! Though I was a small child when the NES first came out, and we definitely did have it, I didn’t become enamored of playing video games for hours until its progeny hit the shelves. The Super Nintendo Entertainment System, which came out in North America in 1991, was exactly what it said on the tin — a super version of the original we all loved, with gorgeous 16-bit graphics and much more capabilities. It even had three times the number of buttons on the controller, with the addition of X, Y, L, and R to complement the old standby A and B.
The SNES is arguably where video gaming hit its stride, and so many games created for that console are still among the gold standard, in this or any decade. As such, and because we can almost guarantee an SNES Classic Edition will be hitting store shelves (in very limited quantities, surely) in the next year or so, in the gallery below is an alphabetical list of the 25 games we’d most like to see on such a tiny device. One caveat: I decided not to add more than one game per franchise unless there are demonstrable differences in gameplay or style.
Let us know in the comments which games you would put on your SNES Classic must-have list!
Images: Nintendo
Kyle Anderson is the Associate Editor for Nerdist and a proud child of the ’90s. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Twitter!
