I’m not one for countdown list, but since the NES was released in the U.S. 40 years ago and because it wwould become the hot thing for several years and ubiquitous in our lives by the end of the decade, I have been thinking about what my favorite games were. But come on, I’ve already blogged about Bases Loaded and Ice Hockey and do you really need to see me gush about The Legend of Zelda, saying things that have already been said a million times?

Besides, not everyone got the marquee games all the times and there were always those random games that we loved even if they weren’t top tier. I got my NES–the Action Set with the gray zapper that I received for my 11th birthday–I got a few games with it aside from the Super Mario Bros./Duck Hunt cartridge (which I played all the time). Some of them were marquee games like Zelda, but there were others that people bought for me because they might have looked interesting (or maybe I did ask for them). What I always found cool ws that Ninetndo did publish its own line of games and they all had different categories. My wife still has her old Nintendo–she had the Deluxe Set with R.O.B.–and one of the box flaps had info that detailed all of the games series that Nintendo offered. In case you want to know, they were:

• Action (Balloon Fight, Clu Clu Land, Ice Climber, Kung Fu, Pinball, Super Mario Bros. Urban Champion)
• Adventure (Kid Icarus, Metroid)
• Arcade Classics (Donkey Kong, Donkey Kong 3, Donkey Kong Jr., Mario Bros., Popeye)
• Education (Donkey Kong Jr. Math)
• Light Gun (Duck Hunt, Gumshoe, Hogan’s Alley, Wild Gunman)
• Programmable Series (Excitebike, Mach Rider, Wrecking Crew)
• Robot Series (Gyromite, Stack Up)
• Sports Series (10-Yard Fight, Baseball, Golf, Ice Hockey, Pro Wrestling, R.C. Pro-Am, Rad Racer, Slalom, Soccer, Tennis, Volleyball)

Now, I am not sure if this list is comprehensive (and I’m pretty sure there was a poster with all the games listed that was included with the NES but it wasn’t in the box). I also didn’t play all of these games and even among the ones I played, I didn’t own all of them. But one of the great things about the NES and your friends all having it was that you were always borrowing one another’s game cartridges, and by the end of the 1980s, you could rent them from the video store. So I got a lot of exposure to some of the more random games, and I thought I would do a rundown of my favorite Nintendo-produced games from the early, pre-Zelda NES days. I’ve got eight altogether and I’m going to count them down.

8. Balloon Fight. I think this is the most random of the games that I chose, and it’s definitely one of the least played out of this list. It’s something that you would have seen in an arcade back in the day. The idea is that you’re a guy with balloons attached to his back and you’re picking off all sorts of obstacles and enemies, many of which have balloons strapped to their backs. So there’s no quest or anything; you’re more or less going board to board to see how high you can score. I’ve always been a big fan of these games, having been introduced to games like Pac-Man years before when I’d see them in grocery stores and the bowling alley and occasionally possessed a quarter. Plus, they make for great games with a low amount of commitment. Crappy level? Just start over. Need to go? Turn it off. Sure, you lose progress, but starting over on something like this isn’t as daunting as, say, having to completely re-start The Adventure of Link.

I never owned this one; instead, my friend two houses down, Matt, had this along with a slew of other games and we often borrowed one another’s cartridges. Most of the time, we played Top Gun and were constantly frustrated by that game (how many times did a missile come right through the cockpit?). I think I spotted Balloon Fight completely randomly one day when we were trying to figure out something else to play, and asked to borrow it when it was time to go home. I had it for maybe a couple of days, and even though I was probalby 12 or 13 at the time and a game for Balloon Fight was probably too “kiddie” for me, I had a lot of fun with its silliness.

7. Ice Climber. This was one of the first games that I played that wasn’t Super Mario Bros. When I was in the fourth grade, my friend DJ had an NES and had several games, one of which was Ice Climber. I remember that he had this habit of playing through a lot of his games while I more or less watched. Ice Climber is a two-player game, so it was more like I sucked when it was my turn and he completed four or five levels and I just sat back and watched.

And didn’t we all know that kid? Like, he wasn’t a complete dick about it; he just tended to show off.

Anyway, this game is as silly as Balloon Fight and has a similar arcade concept. You play as a guy in a snow parka holding at ice axe and jump and chop away at the ice above you until you reach the top of a pyramid. You’re dodging a bunch of stuff along the way: enemies on each floor of the pyramid, birds dropping things, and increasingly slippery surfaces. I bought a copy of this game about 20 years ago when it was pretty cheap on eBay and have only ever been able to get trhough a few levels. Still, you have to love any game that doesn’t take itself too seriously.

6. Baseball. If not for Bases Loaded and a number of other, better baseball games for the system, this would have been higher up on my list. But those games didn’t come out until 1988 and for the first few years of the system, Baseball was really the only baseball game you could play. For all I know there were others, but it was one that we all played.

The game was pretty straightforward: you chose a team that was represented by a particular letter and sort of matched up with an MLB team’s color scheme. Your players didn’t change (i.e., you didn’t make a call to the bullpen or pinch hit) and the only variety you had was between right-handed and left-handed players. But it was nine innings and a game kept you occupied for a solid period of time and didn’t require any special skills beyond knowing how to play baseball.

Plus, it glitched like crazy, to the point where I used to refer to it as “Glitchball.” Runners would reach base and then disappear. Or, they would walk away at random. Balls would disappear mid-path. Sometimes, innings would just end. It wasn’t fun and incredibly frustrating, but there’s something oddly charming about the errors in a game like that. It was also, really, the first sports game that I ever played.

5. Kung Fu. Among the first few games that I got for my birthday with my NES Action Set was Kung Fu, the karate game where you played a guy named Thomas whose girlfriend Sylvia was captured by the big bad named “Mr. X.” and you had to fight your way through the levels of his house Game of Death style. You didn’t have any weapons–just punches and kicks–and you encountered other Kung Fu bad guys, like karate warriors, little people who hugged your legs (seriously, they were annoying), knife-throwers, and a mini-boss on each level. In fact, aside from Super Mario Bros., I think this was the first game that I ever played where each level had a mini-boss.

I obviously played this a lot because it was one of four games I owned when I first got my Nintendo, but I also loved it because it was the closest thing I could get to the computer game Karateka, which I used to play on the Apple IIe clone my parents had for a while. This wasn’t as good as that game, but it was tough and enough of a substitute. And man, I hated how those little guys hugged you and wouldn’t let go.

4. Golf. Among the NES’ sports games were a number of games that were simply named after the sports you played: baseball, tennis, pro wrestling, and golf. This wasn’t a game that I owned back in the late 1980s and I only acquired a copy of it for cheap at a local thrift store about three or four years ago. But what this reminds me of is college.

In my junior year of college–1997-1998, I had grabbed my NES from my parents’ house along with a handful of my games and after determining that everything was working properly, brought it to school. My roommate Drew brought a few games from home, one of which was Golf. Much like those early NES games, it’s simple in its approach. On the left hand of your screen, you have your golfer (clearly Mario on his day off) and on the right, the course. You picked your club, your angle, and determined how hard you were going to hit the ball. It’s the same type of gameplay you still have in golf games, except with 8-bit graphics and only one course.

Between endless games of Mortal Kombat Trilogy on the PlayStation, we played the crap out of this game. We’d watch one another play the game. Most of us weren’t very big golf people and with the exception of playing on and off with my father-in-law for a few years, was never really a golf person. But despite the fact that sitting around and watching other people play Nintendo golf should be one of the least exciting things in the world, it was our jam. I don’t have a lot of fond memories of my social life in the last couple of years of college, but I do have this and that’s pretty cool.

3. Excitebike. This was another game that I first played at a friend’s house and for some reason never actually owned. And what’s funny is that I had played it so much that I actually thought I did. Anyway, I don’t think this game needs much of an explanation, because all of us old school NES kids played it whenever we could. It was dirt bike tricks and racing and the coolest thing was that you could build your own courses.

That, to me, was the best feature of the game and was revolutionary in an era where video games were defined by set levels and designs. Oh sure, Excitebike had pre-set levels and you could race your way through them, but taking the time to pick different obstacles and then challenging one another to get the best time? That was amazing. And of course, there was the one you’d design with all of those high jumps right after one another so that you had to be consistent with your movement lest you fall head over heels for several feet.

2. Metroid. Out of all of the games on the list, this one is the best. Before Zelda came along, Metroid was the game for an enormous, more open world that you had to map and explore and didn’t just go from level 1 to level 10. You had to collect weapons and had two formidable mini-bosses before taking on Mother Brain in what had to be one of the toughest final boss stages. Those damn cheerio things would always knock me off that perch. Oh, and then after beating Mother Brain, you had to race your way out of there only to reveal that the entire time, you were playing as … A gIrL?

It wasn’t shocking per se, but so many characters (with the exception of probably Ms. Pac-Man) were male that Samus Aran being a woman was legitimately surprising (and I’m not sure if the current generation of kids knows that this was the “secret” revealed at the end of Metroid). Although you could play as a girl with the “Justin Bailey” passcode, one of the first “hacks” I learned about getting bonus contents of sorts in a video game. If you entered that password, you played as an un-armored Samus. It didn’t change anything about the game except for your look, and you started out pretty much ready to go for the final stage.

This has been one of my all-time favorite games for years just because of how hard it was to beat. In fact, I think I only ever beat it once, and that ws with the Justin Bailey code, which means that I never actually did an entire run-through without any help. I still have the cartridge and may have to rectify that one day.

1. Pinball. Wait … WHAT?!

Yes, the old Ninetndo Pinball game is my favorite of this original era. Even more than Metroid. Why? Because I played it endlessly when I was a kid and when I was in college. The game was, well, a video game version of a pinball machine and you played it like pinball, using the buttons to move the flippers. If you played long enough, you’d get a “feel” for how things worked and where to position the ball on the flippers to get where you needed to go.

Plus, there were a couple of interesting bonuses. If you hit 100,000 points, the flippers disappeared for a while and you had to go more or less by muscle memory before earning enough points to get them back. And there was a bonus stage where you were Mario holding a girder and deflected a pinball to eat away at the floor underneath a damsel in distress. When she fell through the floor, you caught her and got her to safety, then got the bonus. And then that bonus stage started all over again.

This was one of the games I brought to college and that became a source of serious competition in my dorm room during junior year. Three of us were trying to get to a million points and would actually post scores on a piece of paper that was tacked to the wall. I think all three of us did make it past a million and my highest score ever was somewhere in the 2-3 million point range. Yeah, I guess this time would have been better spent studying or something, but come on … a million points on an old pinball video game? Forget your degree and accomplishments; that’s something to put on a resume.

I don’t buy a lot of old video games these days–I’m trying not to spend the money on these things–but I’d be lying if I told you that seeing one of these old random games in the wild at a good price wouldn’t make me at least consider picking it up. They’re cartridges of comfort and simply seeing pictures of them brings me back to suburban dens of my childhood and the joy and I love that.