Nintendo’s reputation for decades of certified bangers is well-earned, though between new releases and the classics that hog all the attention, it’s easy to overlook some of the company’s more influential games. Maybe you’re young and missed out on entire generations of essential games, or you’re (comparatively) old, like me, and got into video games later in life. Whatever the case, learning about them through cultural osmosis isn’t quite the same as playing them yourself.
I’m not gonna tell you to go play Super Mario Bros. 3 or A Link to the Past. You should play them, but you’ve probably heard that from a dozen other people already. This list is more interested in examining a few pivotal games from Nintendo’s history that marked turning points for the company, either for the risk involved in making them or by representing a high point in creative design that informed Nintendo’s future strategies. All of these are available in some form or another on modern hardware, either via remakes, Nintendo Switch Online’s retro library, or even on PC thanks to later ports.
5
Metroid Prime (Remastered on Nintendo Switch)
Metroid Prime‘s a bit of an obvious choice given its popularity, but it’s no less deserving of a recommendation. It was a big, potentially risky step forward, a bid to make an obsolete franchise relevant again, and Nintendo adopting a genre that its competitors had dominated in that generation. The gambit paid off spectacularly. Metroid Prime is an exceptional case study in level design and integrating storytelling and puzzles in a type of interactive media that’s usually hostile to those things. In other words, it proved FPS games can be smart and shoot-y at the same time without sacrificing anything. It also set a precedent for how Nintendo would approach its other lagging franchises in later years, like Donkey Kong Bananza and Breath of the Wild — redefining them with big creative leaps that defied expectations.
4
Pikmin (Gamecube, NSO)
Nintendo played it safe with the GameCube. You might think otherwise, what with Mario Sunshine sending the plumber on a goop-cleaning vacation and The Wind Waker turning Link and Zelda into cartoons. These were still Mario and Zelda games, though. And what is Luigi’s Mansion, but a Mario is Missing that doesn’t suck? Pikmin was something new and wildly different than anything Nintendo had developed for years: A real-time strategy game (a genre that, nearly three decades later, remains quite niche) starring a corporate lackey and an army of sentient, expendable vegetables.
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