The Consensus Top 100 Nintendo Entertainment System Games
Over a quarter-century after the last licensed NES game was published, RETRO is publishing the largest-ever survey of the console's top games—curating knowledge from 100+ experts and industry outlets.
{Note: If you’re interested in reading this RETRO article in full but aren’t yet a full subscriber, check out RETRO’s first subscription sale, which runs through Tuesday, November 30, 2021. During this sale, you’ll get 30% off an annual subscription to RETRO—bringing the monthly cost of a RETRO subscription to about $2.90/month. Click here to access this deal yourself, or to give RETRO as a gift by entering in the email address of your intended gift recipient.}
Introduction
Every “best of” list comes with caveats—but this one fewer than most, as it’s such a large-scale curation of top-shelf intelligence on retro gaming that it really has every indicator of reliability you could ask for. That said, one thing that must always be underlined when you’re writing about a pre-internet gaming console with a game library that’s both vast and persistently high-quality is that very few experts have played every NES game, which all but assures that nearly every expert hasn’t played certain NES games that otherwise would have been on their “top games” ranking.
So a ranking like this one necessarily focuses on games that were widely known and discussed in the 1980s and 1990s, as well as a number of—excuse the clunky phrase— “hidden gems” that came to be admired as NES classics only in this century; experts and industry outlets tend to work from this admittedly fairly large group of games in deciding which ones to recommend to retro gamers and those just now experiencing NES games for the first time via an NES emulator like NES.emu and a site full of NES “ROMs” (games) like EmulatorGames.Net.
A “true” Top 100 list would undoubtedly be an amalgamation of this list and a ranking recently published at RETRO, “The Definitive Top 100: Underrated NES Games.” As the 100+ industry experts and outlets who were cited for this latter ranking were by definition striving to focus on less-discussed games—and speaking into a prospective audience of avid gamers ready and willing to look beyond the most-discussed games—it was inevitable that they would turn up dozens of games that are probably among the best ever released for the NES but so obscure as to be unlikely to appear on “Top 100” lists intended for a general audience. A true NES expert might well prefer The Krion Conquest to one or more of the Mega Man games for the NES—the former game so resembles the games from the latter series that they can almost be considered on a similar scale—but if one leaves a Mega Man game off a Top 100 list in favor of a game no one has heard of, and engages in this sort of integrity-first ordering multiple times in a single Top 100 list, the end result will look so confusing to casual gamers that it may discredit the ranking as a whole. This is why I hesitate to title the ranking below a ranking of the “best NES games,” as I know it’d be more accurate to call it a survey of the “best [mainstream] NES titles.” Again, fuse this list with “The Definitive Top 100: Underrated NES Games”—especially (spoiler alert) if you do so with the updated edit of this list about to be published at RETRO—and you’ve got yourself something truly authoritative and comprehensive.
Methodology
While all the sources used for this ranking are listed and linked to below, I’ll note that some of the sources listed five games, some ten, some twenty, some twenty-five, some fifty, some 100 and some a bizarrely exact number like “19” or “26.” It’s actually critical that the sources for this ranking be slightly different in total size, as if the only sources were “Top 100” listings we would invariably end up with a ten- or twenty-way tie at the top of the ranking—a summation of all games that couldn’t possibly be left off any Top 100 list. But when some of your expert sources are artificially limiting themselves to just five or ten or twenty NES games, it ensures that the total curation will reflect not just the fact that some NES games make every Top 100 list but that some games are so beloved that they are a cut above even these games—because they still appear on smaller (top-5, top-10, or top-20) lists. So don’t be surprised if you click the links at the bottom of this ranking and encounter different types of “best of” lists. That’s by design.
By the same token, one might think that a ranking of this sort would be points-based—i.e., that a game would get (say) “100 points” if it appears at “#1” on a given expert’s list, while a game that appeared at “#2” on such a list would get “99 points,” and so on. But in fact that’s not what this ranking does—nor should it be. This is a ranking of how many times a given NES game appears on a “top NES games” list, and it has to be this way (and has to utilize a survey of lists of varying lengths, as discussed above) to limit the unfair advantage some games might otherwise have over others. While a point system could be useful if every source cited were a “Top 100” list—more or less an impossibility, as there simply aren’t enough existing lists of this length to curate them into a meta-list of any meaning—it becomes manifestly unfair if one is using rankings of different lengths. An industry outlet that ranks only the five “best” NES games would implicitly, under a point system, be giving the sixth-best game (the last one left off its ranking) “0 points,” even as another industry outlet that ranked that game sixth in a top-ten list would be giving it “95 points,” leading to big discrepancies in how each game is being treated by each list. Under the system used by RETRO, the “first game out” in this hypothetical would only be one point down as a result of the fact that one outlet used a top-five ranking scheme while another chose a top-ten one.
While this may sound a bit confusing at first blush, it’s really quite simple: what you see below is a curation of how many times a given NES game appeared in a “best NES game” ranking published by a respected industry media outlet or retro gaming expert. Each game’s number of appearances were then slotted into the ranked listing below. The result, combined with RETRO’s recent “most underrated games” ranking, offers readers the most comprehensive, diverse, and reliable assay of the NES console in its history.
Note that the 356 NTSC and 68 non-NTSC games listed below effectively comprise a list of NES games considered to be (as to their quality) in the top half of the console’s library by U.S. outlets and reviewers. This means that if you’re one of the thousands of gamers returning to the NES library as a means of self-distraction during the COVID-19 pandemic and its aftermath, this listing can be used as a “console bible” of sorts.
The Top 25 Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) Games
{with votes from 100 industry experts and outlets in parentheses}