The reborn Sky Skipper cabinet had its American debut at the Southern Fried Gaming Expo in Atlanta in 2017, where I got to spend a good amount of time with it, and the game itself will make its Nintendo console debut on the Switch this month. Collectors recovered a handful of printed circuit boards, though, and an official attempt to rescue Sky Skipper from obscurity and recreate the arcade cabinet was born. Its arcade machines were converted to run Popeye, and other than a cabinet kept in storage in Japan, no Sky Skipper arcade machines survived into the ‘00s.
The so-called “lost” Nintendo arcade game never came to the US because it basically bombed in Japan. It’s a must-play just because of how odd it is. It may not be fun, in the classic sense of the word, but it’s a true sense of accomplishment just making it through the first level. It gets incredibly hectic as it goes, with you having to shoot out everything in Stevenson’s way without running out of ammo, while still remembering to shoot him to make him jump when needed. Stevenson jumps with every shot, and your job is to keep him from plummeting to his doom or getting hit by any of the many obstacles flying around every stage. You’re constantly shooting him with the Light Zapper.
You’re not controlling him with a D-pad and buttons, though. Stevenson, looks like the star of a classic NES platformer, and that’s not entirely off-base-he does walk to the right and jump from platform to platform. Your trenchcoated private eye character, Mr. This might be the weirdest-and hardest-game Nintendo made in the ‘80s. So here we go: the 25 best games that Nintendo made in the 1980s, starting with a weird sequel that was probably better than it had any right being.
3, which defined the year 1990 for me more than any other piece of pop culture, can make this list-it was released in Japan a full 16 months before it came to America, all the way back in 1988. That might sound unimportant, but it’s how a game like Super Mario Bros. And yeah, we’re looking at the original release dates, which were almost always in Japan, and well before the games ever hit the States. We’re exclusively talking about games developed by one of Nintendo’s in-house teams and released during the 1980s.
Pro Am and Final Fantasy, which were both published by Nintendo in America).
We’re not considering just games that were released on the NES, or even games that Nintendo itself published but were created by other designers (hence the lack of R.C. To that end, we’ve decided to look at the very best games developed by Nintendo during the decade where they most clearly dominated the videogame industry. Nintendo goes out of its way to pay respect to its history, which compels the players to respect it in turn. series, which is almost like an official company history in the form of a fighting game beyond the obvious references in the game’s character line-up and stages, Nintendo games both iconic and obscure are commemorated in Smash’s trophies and in-game stickers. Nintendo still pays tribute to most of these games in the Smash Bros.
A run of quality arcade games followed, and although they weren’t all successful, they were almost all interesting and worthy of remembering today. The company established itself as a videogame powerhouse with the 1981 arcade smash Donkey Kong, which also introduced the company’s mascot, Mario. Nintendo was more than just the NES, though. That’s why, to people who were around at the time, Nintendo is still synonymous with videogames. It took a combination of the NES’s superior performance, Nintendo’s superlative game line-up, and a canny marketing plan that convinced console-weary retailers that the NES was more of a toy than a piece of technology to resuscitate the market for home videogames in America. Atari’s spectacular flame-out scared retailers away from videogame consoles, with a deluge of terrible, unsold 2600 games junking up cut-out bins (and literally getting buried and paved over) around America. Yeah, Atari might’ve ruled the home market for those first couple of years, and arcades thrived throughout, but Nintendo basically saved the entire industry in America when it launched the Nintendo Entertainment System over here in 1985. When it comes to games, you can pretty much call the ‘80s the Nintendo decade.