As somebody who's into numbers and statistics, I enjoy reading about the release dates for NES games. It's interesting, because many games had a big gap between the Japanese release and the American port. I think that can explain a lot of the poor reaction to certain games. For example, I'll never call Hydlide a good game. But when you consider that it was released in 1986 in Japan vs 1989 in the US, it would look a lot better compared to the games of 1986.

It's also cool to go through and see which games were released in each month. It allows me to kind of relive the 8-bit era, even for the years before I knew anything about video games. I've also been getting into Famicom games recently, and this helps my knowledge of them.

So I've compared the lists of Famicom and NES release dates, and I'm going to take the earliest release date for each game and go through all of them. I'll start by doing all of 1983, since there were only a handful of games released in the Famicom's first year. I'll explain a bit about each unfamiliar game, as well as point out any crazy differences in the dates.

I believe there were 1,051 Famicom games and 198 Famicom Disk System games to go along with 677 NES games. That's licensed only. By my count, only 52.9% of NES games had Famicom versions. So that makes for about 700 Japanese only games (plus FDS).

For Japanese release dates, I used Famicom World and NesCartDB. There's one Japanese game where I couldn't find a date (Family School). For the NES versions, I used the Nintendo PDF. I know Metroid and Dragon Warrior 3 are wrong on it, so I corrected those two.


Games by year

		FC	FDS	NES
1983		10
1984		20
1985		69		18
1986		86	35	17
1987		119	68	56
1988		138	54	63
1989		148	20	96
1990		157	13	169
1991		149	6	106
1992		95	2	97
1993		52		43
1994		7		12

Games by year - PCT

		FC	FDS	NES
1983		1.0%
1984		1.9%
1985		6.6%		2.7%
1986		8.2%	17.7%	2.5%
1987		11.3%	34.3%	8.3%
1988		13.1%	27.3%	9.3%
1989		14.1%	10.1%	14.2%
1990		14.9%	6.6%	25.0%
1991		14.2%	3.0%	15.7%
1992		9.0%	1.0%	14.3%
1993		4.9%		6.4%
1994		0.7%		1.8%

The medians for all three systems:

FDS: September 1987
FC: September 1989
NES: July 1990


Alright, so let's begin with 1983. Only 10 games were released in the system's first year, and most of them should be pretty familiar. Games in bold below are Famicom exclusive.

Jul-83    Donkey Kong
Jul-83    Donkey Kong Jr.
Jul-83    Popeye

The three Famicom launch titles, all based on arcade hits. Interestingly, none were NES launch titles in October 1985. They were all released together in June 1986 in the US.

Aug-83    Gomoku Narabe Renju
Aug-83    Mahjong

The first two games that never left Japan. Mahjong is one of many of that genre for the system, while Gomoku is a Japanese board game where you have to get five pieces of the same color in a row. Basically like a bigger version of tic-tac-toe.

Sep-83    Mario Bros.

The arcade version came out in June of that year, so that's a pretty quick port. Moreso than the launch games, which all were at least a year older than their arcade counterparts. Again, it was a June 1986 release in the US (after SMB).

Nov-83    Popeye no Eigo Asobi

Popeye teaches English! A cartoon with that premise might be exciting, but not a video game.

Dec-83    Baseball
Dec-83    Donkey Kong Jr. no Sansuu Asobi

These were the two oldest NES launch titles. The latter is Donkey Kong Jr Math. I'm not sure if being released in 1983 makes Baseball more or less impressive compared to the other early sports games.

???-83    Donkey Kong Jr. / Jr. Sansuu Lesson

May have come out in 1984 according to one site. It's a combo of the two previous DK Jr games, released with a special version of the system: "The title included parts of both Donkey Kong Jr. and Donkey Kong Jr. Math.."


1983 - Game of the Year

So that's it for the first year. Pretty slim pickings. Donkey Kong is most beloved game here, but it's an incomplete port, missing one of the game's four stages (the cement/pie factory). For that reason, I'll take Mario Bros. as my top game of 1983.

1. Mario Bros.
2. Donkey Kong Jr
3. Donkey Kong
4. Popeye
5. Baseball

Your picks?