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What pre-NES games do you still recommend today?
Either because the game itself is still good, or because you think it's able to be appreciated for more historical/didactic reasons (e.g. Game X is the origin for a certain trope).
Or any other reason really -- you're not limited to the two.
Importantly, why do you recommend them? What appeal do they have to modern audiences?
The reason I'm saying "pre-NES" (Nintendo Entertainment System) is simply because I imagine that a good number of us here started gaming with the NES and don't have as much of a pulse on what came before it. I imagine even more of us started gaming well after the NES and would appreciate insight into that period of gaming history.
Rogue is a 1980 classic that I still play regularly (though still rather poorly) and its design sensibilities had a bit of a mainstream resurgence through the 00s indie game boom, to the point where every game and its grandmother now aspires to be "roguelike" in some (often misguided) sense.
It's a turn-based single player character tactics/light RPG dungeon crawler with procedurally generated levels and high stakes risks attached to exploration, combat, item use and time spent. It rewards resourcefulness and calculated risk taking, but a great deal of it just comes down to luck. I think highly skilled players of later Rogue-like games like NetHack or Brogue CE are more consistent at beating that than anyone will ever be at Rogue, but those are also relatively modern games still in active development.
I think it can be appreciated for what it is, but I want you to play it for the entirely selfish reason that it's increasingly difficult on tag-based platforms like Steam to actually find the whole genre of games that are actually meaningfully like Rogue, so I wish more people would play the original and be more conservative about calling games "roguelike".
It should be noted that I think most versions of Rogue you'll likely casually be able to pick up are somewhat newer than the NES and the original Unix game. The one I first played was released for the PC by Epyx in 1984. The one I play now is a newer Unix release from 1986 and maintained in the BSD-based operating systems.
I have a soft spot for Jupiter Lander for the C64 and VIC-20. You have to land an LEM-like module using thrusters to position yourself as well as compensate for inertia and gravity with a limited amount of fuel which doubles as your base score. There are different landing spots which each has a score multiplier. The more difficult the landing, the higher the multiplier. Basically a simplified version of the arcade classic Lunar Lander for home computers because you can't turn your lander.
It's very simple but I think it's timeless fun, and a great game to pass the joystick around with company. The mechanics have aged very well, I think.
Infocom became successful in the early 80s for releasing a bunch of text-based puzzle adventure games, the most prominent probably being Zork. The game would start by offering a description of a scene and you would type plain English commands in response to perform actions like picking up and moving objects, walking or climbing to a different scene. There were earlier games in this genre like Adventure, but I think it's fair to say that Infocom popularized the genre for the brief time that was commercially viable. Their games were also typically bigger, more complex and better written than earlier examples, and the engine behind their parser based games survives to this day in the form of the Z-machine.
Zork is a good play if you don't mind taking notes and have the patience for experimentation with sometimes obscure puzzles verging on moon logic. Infocom marketed their stuff by saying that they drew "graphics from the limitless imagery of your imagination" and in that sense I think a lot of their games still hold up even if their unforgiving game design may not have aged so gracefully.
NetHack itself almost qualifies for this list, having been released in 1987. It also just received an update in the last month (as of writing this comment).
As a guy writing his second interactive fiction, this time using ZIL, it’s so great to see people outside the space directly with a love for the medium. Have you played any more modern IF parser games?
I love IF games when I was younger. In the early 00s I found a website that had a bunch of them, but I think it's been lost to time now. Can you help point me in the direction of where to find them?
Not the person you're replying to, but the Interactive Fiction Database has info and reviews on lots of different IF games, plus generally has links to where to get the game/parser needed.
Depends what you are looking for. Most of the Infocom stuff is all over the place, but for more modern IF you need to check out ifdb.org and intfiction.org.
Oh, ZIL, that's cool! I've played some modern games in the genre but it's been a while. I remember being impressed by a 1999 IF take on Hunt the Wumpus by Andrew Plotkin: Hunter, in Darkness.
I'd love to hear more about your games!
Thanks! Right now my only published one was in Ectocomp 2026 (finished 7th!) and is on my itch.io account: When the Television Decides to Murder Your Girlfriend
Enjoyed it! Very absurd setting, and I like the interface. Avoids verb hunting without becoming a CYOA type game. I found a small typo ("arugment" when talking to the dashboard).
Thanks! I'll hunt that down and try to get it fixed. It was a fun experience, and yeah, gruescript is very cool. This time around I'm doing a more traditional parser game. You know... create meaning through challenge :)
Came here to suggest Rogue. The person who maintains bsdgames-nonfree in Debian (which is how I usually play Rogue) is (or maybe was) actually here on tildes, they showed up once years ago when I was talking about Rogue!
Cool, it's a small world!
Ever played Beneath Apple Manor? Supposedly it's a bit of a proto-roguelike similar in design to Rogue but released a year before.
Never heard of it before now, but now I want to play it - do you know what the easiest way would be?
It can be played in a browser in the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/beneath-apple-manor-1978-version-fixed
I've never given it an honest run myself.
Tempest and Joust both fuck.
QIX and Asteroids, too.
Jeff Minter's revisits of Tempest also went hard. Now I'm wondering what he could do with Joust.
And now I realize that level-to-level minigames in a "Joust 4000" would have to be psychedelic Flappy Bird.
Qix had me addicted for a good long while. My wife, my brother in law and I were competing for the top score for weeks.
It's got a nice combination of strategy, quick reaction and RNG that makes it pretty interesting and fun to play.
I played Qix on my Game Boy all the time. My mother also used to borrow my GB to play it and Tetris.
Space Invaders seems like an obvious one. It was a cultural phenomenon and I believe the first ever arcade game ported to home consoles. It has been referenced in pop-culture hundreds of times since it released over 40 years ago. My all-time favorite TV show Futurama did an entire episode as an homage the game.
In fact the Atari VCS / 2600 version of Space Invaders is astoundingly good for the time. It was brilliantly coded to work around the limitations of the console. It's not quite as good as the arcade but very fun and much better than a lot of the other arcade ports that came later.
Nerdy details: The VCS was designed to play games like pong. Technically it had:
There's a good book called Racing the Beam that explains the hardware.
The arcade Space Invaders had 11 columns and 5 rows of aliens.
The VCS version had 6 columns and 6 rows of aliens.
The specific reason for the 6 columns is because there were only 2 sprites. But there was a sprite mode that allowed a sprite to be repeated twice on the same line. So you could make 2 sprites look like 6.
The reason why there could be more than one row of invaders is because the same sprite could be redrawn on another line with a different shape.
The score on the screen was also drawn by reusing sprites.
That was part of what "Racing the Beam" was about.
I still think about this game a lot
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Mind_Forever_Voyaging
Don't read this if you don't want to be spoiled, but if you want to play an early Infocom game which is a little eerily close to home, this is for you.
Enduro for the 2600 is a fun endurance racing game. It features a day/night cycle and weather that changes the driving. I still find it a lot of fun!
Enduro was definitely the best racing game on the 2600, not that there were a lot of contenders.
Someone already mentioned Joust and I have to echo that it's a legitimately fun game as it is.
Would also vote for River Raid, an endless vertical shooter on the Atari 2600 that gets increasingly frantic the farther you get. I don't think you'd quite call it a bullet-hell but you can kinda see it from there once you get past a certain point. But it's incredibly fun to kill time with.
River Raid was one of the better Atari 2600 games for sure. It was one of the later Atari games that seemed impossible for such a system when you look at some of the earlier games.
I was scrolling and about to post this one. One of the few Atari titles that I remember well. I think it's still very playable as I put a few mins on it in emulators every few years for the memory.
While I'm at it I think race is a good one too, just a preview of a genra that isn't around too much now q days but is srill fun. For full effect you need the dial controllers.
There are a ton of arcade games that are still fun. Most of them were space themed and you only lasted for about 10 minutes even if you were good. So they were kind of like minigames are now. Here are some at random but there are many more great ones:
Computer games:
Most of these were initially on the Apple II but many were also ported to Atari 800 and Commodore 64. Some are arcade games but may have hundreds of levels. Some were action adventure and may take weeks to finish.
To go along with the vein that @hobbes64 was running with, I think that arcade games are some of the biggest standouts here that aged well enough that people should still play. I'm sure a lot of the big ones (Pacman, Galaga, Space Invaders) are obvious, but I really liked some of the vector graphics games that weren't already mentioned such as Tempest, Star Wars (the sit down model was my holy grail of machines to own).
There were also some great and truly innovative RPGs on various PC systems that I really liked. The first few Ultima games, Wizardry games, and SSI games (Questron was a good one definitely before the NES). Many of these were ported to the NES later, but the ports were iffy. I don't know how well they'd hold up now, but they were really fun and engrossing at the time.
My favorite was Megamania (1982) for Atari 2600. Basically a Space Invaders-like but with more fun. The pilot of the playable ship is obsessed with food. The enemies range from hamburgers to bowties, etc. Enemies move and look better than Invaders imo. You can earn extra ships. Still racing a clock to clear each wave. There's also a setting to use either straight-flying missiles or guided missiles (using your controller to guide, not homing missiles). Plus it's just a lot of nostalgia for me. I dug it out of my dad's stuff when I was about 6, hooked it up, and played it way too much.
Arcade: Joust, Asteroids, QIX, Robotron.
Flicky but that was released after NES.
Computer: Lode Runner
I'm a big fan of the mechanics of QIX (wiki). The 1990 GAL Panic is just a thoroughly better update with much better graphics and smoother game play, BUT with the unfortunate drawback of being an Eroge. In 2022, atari made a brand new but looks like 1980 Qyx -- why. Make it look like Lumines or something maybe?
If anyone knows of a Gal Panic style Qix that looks great without it being an Eroge please let me know. Maybe I'll have to make my own.....
Agreed that Gals Panic is the better game, but it's very much post-NES. There is a non-eroge version called Gals Street, and the Saturn version is pretty clean.
ps: at one point most of the wiki page for Gals Panic was written/sourced by me alone. The detailed comparison of the features of each version was really cool, but has been edited out. Editors gonna edit. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Gals_Panic&oldid=444535524
Have you played Gal Pani X (an old Windows doujin game based on Gals Panic)
Oh wow no I've not played Gal Pani X , assuming it also has naked people in this one?
That's amazing someone on Tildes is an expert on the game :D I'm looking up Gals Street right now (edit) and not finding anything . How can I play this, hopefully on an emulator?
Never assume :) I think anime girls in bikinis is as much as Gal Pani X gets. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8TLFawANk64
Sorry the clean version of Gals Panic is called Panic Street, not Gals Street. https://www.mobygames.com/game/69889/panic-street/
Mame emulator! Thank you!!
I don't have strong opinions here unless you'd count Famicom as "pre-NES" which it technically is, but probably not what you meant. Much of my early learning about programming was from messing around with a PC that had Q-BASIC support along with open source code for Gorillas (banana throwing game in the mold of Scorched Earth) and Nibbles (snake), both of which were competent games for their time.
What I'll offer instead is a Youtube channel that's under the radar and does a great job of covering mostly Japanese-exclusive games from the early eras, including some from the very early days like Epoch's attempts at a console: https://www.youtube.com/@RndStranger/
I always see the parameters on my questions as guidelines rather than hard rules, so feel free to give your strong Famicom-related opinions as well if you wish!
Gorillas was so fun to play around with and modify. I don't think it was released with MS DOS 5, but I do think its weird you said "in the mold of Scorched Earth" as I am nearly positive that gorillas was out first. Anyway, I am just happy you mentioned it, and I hope it makes some people go play around with it.
Correct, it was out first. Rather than name more contemporary comparisons (ShellShock Live, Gunbound come to mind), I thought I'd name the older title in Scorched Earth that's probably best known for pushing the genre forward.
Yeah, fair enough, though since were naming names, I'd like to throw out the Worms series since those were probably the most famous, and my personal favorite.
I recommend 1976’s Colossal Cave Adventure, generally considered the first text adventure game. Because there are no visuals, it’s not held back by the graphical limitations of the era. Assuming you have an imagination and an attention span (admittedly not something one should assume in 2026) the game holds up rather well.
There have been a lot of different versions of the game over the decades, and that’s one of the more interesting things about it. Will Crowther’s original game (just called Adventure) was found on Stanford’s computer systems by Don Woods, who is really responsible for what happened next. He significantly expanded the game, retitled it, and distributed it WITH the source code so others could make their own versions too. It’s delightfully organic and collaborative. A fun bit of open-source chaos from the early hacker scene of the ‘70s.
It’s also the namesake of Tildes’ own Colossal Game Adventure, and for good reason!
NetHack!
Released in Europe on the 8-bit home computers before the end of 1985 you've got some games that were way ahead of their time. Three of my picks would be Elite (1984 on the BBC/Electron), Knight Lore, and The Lords of Midnight.
Elite was also released on the NES in Europe in the early 90s, and is the easiest to play emulated due to the cut-down controls and easy saving. The computer versions still hold up though, but you need patience to build up cash to buy equipment for your ship. The NES version has an auto-docking system that makes the early game really too easy. The Electron version is cut down, with few different ship types and many game features removed due to the lack of RAM. The BBC version would be the one to play. Trade goods between different systems, fly around shooting things, scoop up cargo, plan your route, make your own goals ("I really want to visit that Anarchy planet on the other side of the galaxy"). Getting your status to the titular Elite takes forever, dozens of hours shooting baddies, you get bored well before that sadly.
Knight Lore is a great game - maybe the first isometric puzzle-platformer? You have to run around the map collecting items and add them to the cauldron in the center of the maze. The items are semi-randomly distributed around the map, and the order you need to return them is semi-random too. You know which is next when you visit the cauldron, and the overall order is taken from a circular list of 14 items so once you've seen a couple, you can predict what's next (if you know the full list). It is insanely difficult though. If you learn the map, figure out how the traps work, and the pattern of item spawns, it can still be beaten.
Lords of Midnight is a Tolkien-inspired first person strategy game. It's fairly obtuse, the UI is cumbersome, the keyboard controls are not obvious, but if you persevere there's a compelling game buried in there. It has multiple ways to win, and hidden depth. The easiest victory is a Frodo-style return the magic item to a particular location, with said magic item being held in the enemy stronghold. The idea is that you lure the enemy out with your army, sneak in with the Frodo-like guy, then leg it for the destruction location. The most difficult method is defeating the enemy armies, Two-Towers-style. You have to wander around the map with your starting guys recruiting the free armies and lords. Some can only be recruited by certain other lords, and all the time the enemy advances so it is a race against (turn-based) time. Then the ultimate challenge is managing to fulfill both objectives in the same game.
Check out The Making of Karateka if you haven't already (maybe not technically pre-NES). You can play the original or remastered game, and also get to explore the design and creation process. Really cool from the historical side and still fun and challenging as a game.
Rebelstar on the ZX Spectrum. It's the progenitor of the UFO/X-Com line with a ton of recognizable elements. It's 1986 so technically not pre-NES but the platform (Speccy) pre-dates the NES. Loved it back in the day and still mess around with it every once in a while.
I can't believe no one has said Warlords yet. It's a four-player version of Breakout. I cannot overstate how amped people can get over Warlords.
Are we counting Chess? /s
Depending on the region, I'd say that the most influential games for me before the release of the NES would be Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?, but it didn't come out before the Famicom. Classic Edutainment Game that taught geography and history and the show was always on in my house. That or The Oregon Trail. RIP Turgle Burgle, I shouldn't have forded the river (again).