Nintendo nostalgia is not the same thing to all people: There are those who can’t walk past a Donkey Kong machine without dropping in a quarter, and those not much younger who find it unplayable because they started gaming with the Super Nintendo. Hard as it may be to believe, there even exist today adults who, asked about the “old Nintendo games” they played as toddlers, think of 1998’s Zelda: Ocarina of Time.
Even within the more limited category of Nintendo Entertainment System nostalgia, there’s something of a generational split. We didn’t get our Nintendo until 1988, three years after it launched in the U.S. So we didn’t spend very much time with the earliest games that Nintendo brought to America, the Ice Climbers and the Clu Clu Lands. Back in the day, the only time I actually played these games was with a friend whose parents bought him a NES when it launched. I messed around with them for a few seconds each before deciding they were too simple and not especially polished compared with the many newer games that were available by then.
NES Remix, a new Wii U game available via download, is an homage to the 8-bit era. It takes NES games and creates mini-challenges out of them, bite-sized micro-games about the length and difficulty of a level of Angry Birds. This is a clever idea that makes good use of Nintendo’s old assets. It’s also very specifically focused on the oldest NES games, so it’s only going to scratch the nostalgia itch of the early-adopter segment of the NES generation. For the rest of us, it’s more like an odd curiosity.
But that can be good, too.
I think there’s something of a cultural divide at play here. This game was simultaneously released in Japan as Famicom Remix. The Famicom was released in Japan in 1983, two years before the NES. The games that were our “launch titles” in the U.S. were a handpicked selection of the best games from the first two years of the Famicom library. So while these games had a brief shelf life in the West (making many of them collector’s items today), they were the big things in home gaming for years in Japan. I imagine they’re more appreciated there, and with Nintendo still very Japan-centric in its choosing which classic games and series to revive, we have a selection of games that’s a bigger nostalgia trip for Japanese players than American players.
Not entirely, though. No matter where you came in on the NES timeline, you probably played Super Mario Bros. and The Legend of Zelda, two of the games in this package. You might be a little spotty on the rest: Balloon Fight, Excitebike, Mario Bros., Urban Champion, et cetera. Oh, and some of the sports games that were so early they only needed one-word titles: Golf. Tennis. Baseball.