Remembering Nintendo Power, Vol. 1: The Official Top 50 NES Games As of 35 Years Ago Today
Nintendo Power magazine for years ranked Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) games via a system that polled players, professionals, and dealers. This new Retro series celebrates that legacy.
{Note: The beginning of this Retro article is free to the public. The full article is available to all Retro subscribers. Click the red button below to subscribe to Retro for a month for only $5—or save $10 and subscribe to Retro for an entire year for just $50.}
Introduction
If you’re anything like me, you pored over every issue of Nintendo Power magazine in the second half of the 1980s and the early part of the 1990s. And you may also have, much like me, been entranced by the magazine’s colorful, data-filled Top 30 Rankings.
Those rankings—and remember, this was in the days before the internet—connected individual NES players with untold millions of gamers from around the world by way of giving us all a sense of what games others were playing and loving on the only video game console (it certainly seemed to many of us at the time) that actually mattered.
It’s incredible to think that the first issue of Nintendo Power dropped almost exactly 35 years ago; the July/August 1988 edition of the gaming magazine was its inaugural one.
The Top 30 rankings that were the highlight of the magazine stand as an incredible historical record: one that chronicles the rise and fall in popularity (among gamers, professional game developers, and sellers of video games) of the most famous games in video game history.
From Super Mario Bros. to Metroid, from The Legend of Zelda to Ninja Gaiden, the Nintendo Power Top 30 rankings are as important a historical record as video game historians have to keep track of the fondness certain foundational video games were held in at the time—and that’s a particularly significant task given the recent study showing that 87% of video games are “critically endangered” (i.e. unavailable to buy in any format) and certain games that were wildly popular at the time they were released, as evidenced by the Nintendo Power rankings, have since become unjustly forgotten.
Retro is publishing these 35-year-old rankings on their anniversary but also including some much harder-to-find data: the voting breakdowns for each game, which tell us whether they were most popular with consumers, professional gamers, retailers, or some combination of the three groups. Retro is also publishing the full original cover artwork for every games (which is sure to take many readers, just as it does me, down memory lane).
In the data below, you’ll see “N/A” beside certain vote totals. That usually indicates that a game hadn’t yet been made available to consumers long enough for it to have received any votes from the “player” poll respondents. On the other hand, if a game receives zero votes from the “professional” poll respondents despite being available, the “—” notation is used to indicate that professionals knowingly didn’t vote for it.
And Now for the Twist…
I wanted to be certain that this series was adding something to what avid readers of Nintendo Power in the 1980s and 1990s already experienced, so in addition to (as noted above) offering hard data about consumer, pro-gamer, and game-dealer attitudes on the NES games listed below—and any games that appear in the series in the future—I’ve also done something I know some readers will appreciate: I’ve used the data at my disposal to expand what was originally a merged, three-source Top 30 ranking into a comprehensive Top 50 ranking.
So the ranking at Retro below, though still based entirely on original Nintendo Power data, will be 67% longer than the original, giving retro gamers a much better sense of which games were popular when and with whom, and therefore what their likelihood is of remaining “classics” decades into the future (in view of the herein-demonstrated popularity they demonstrated with a diverse population of NES-lovers last century).
To underscore that—however “new” much of this data may be to some gamers—it nevertheless comes from the original Nintendo Power data-set, I’ve used a similar font and color scheme for these rankings as was used in Nintendo Power all those years ago.
I recommend checking out back issues of Nintendo Power, which can be found online and in some cases—if in pristine condition—can fetch $100,000+ at auction. Yes, really.
{Note: For those who may be wondering, Nintendo Power ceased print publication more than a decade ago, on December 11, 2012—the 285th issue of the magazine. However it, returned almost exactly five years later, in mid-December of 2017, in a digital (podcast-only) format.}
The Nintendo Power Top 50 Rankings: July/August 1988
{with total votes, gamers’ votes, votes from gaming “pros,” and votes from dealers for all titles}
🟥 TOTAL: 2144 | 🟨 PLAYERS: 1496 | 🟦 PROS: 323 | 🟩 DEALERS: 325
