The Best Nintendo Game Every Year 1983 - 2024

There is no better company for tracking the history of gaming than Nintendo. From capturing the imagination of kids and adults alike with the splendour of the Famicom and NES, all the way to the stranglehold that the Switch has over us all, Nintendo has seen it all and been it all.

And the thing is, they’ll be around forever. Even at the company’s lowest, they’ve never really been in danger of bankruptcy thanks to shrewd marketing, recognisable mascots, a huge core audience and a back catalogue of some of the greatest games of all time at their disposal . For over 40 years, the Big N has enthralled, appalled and always done things their own way.

But which Nintendo games have defined each one of those years?

First of all some important definitions: “Nintendo” in this article refers to any and all systems released by the company starting from the Famicom onwards, and doesn’t necessarily mean first-party only. However, like our Xbox and PlayStation lists of the same kind, this article will only take into account console exclusives, including timed releases and, in a few early cases, arcade games that made their home on Nintendo systems.

1983 might be the single most important year in all of gaming history when you get right down to it. The rise in Japanese developers had an open path to dominance in the wake of the American video game crash (or “Atari shock”), and Nintendo couldn’t have picked a better year to introduce their first-ever home console. 

The Famicom Entertainment System arrived in the Japanese market in July 1983, bringing some of the company’s biggest arcade hits with it. Chief among them, of course, was Donkey Kong. 

Just on the surface, the game introduced us to both DK and Mario, two of Nintendo’s most enduring mascots, even if they have vastly transformed along the way. Whilst the game can’t necessarily be called the single point of origin for the platforming genre, many people take for granted that it's main mechanic of having the player jump gaps and obstacles changed everything.

That, in itself, is an awesome legacy but it also gave us people so obsessed with world record scores that they got into legal battles over whether or not they cheated to obtain them, which is a pretty unique claim to fame too.