F.A.Q.

1. NES games are fascinating. Limitations breed creativity. They had so little to work with - the computer in an average car is orders of magnitude more powerful. Storage space for simple things like text was at a premium. No one really knew what they were doing. Entire genres were created and refined. Amazing music was composed. Designers accomplished surprising things with an awkward limited color palette.

At well over 700 games, there's a lot to explore in the catalog (good and bad). It can be hard to get your head around it when you're coming in fresh. I hope this site can help.

2. There used to be more highly specific, non-monetized, non-algorithm chasing rabbit holes you could go down on the web. Things were better then.

3. I wanted to experiment with generating static web sites from publicly available data.

That's what we called game carts where I grew up.

It started with the adults. Removable solid state storage was rare. They weren't used to it. They did know the VCR and Walkman. Both used tapes that were loaded into their players with a similar mechanism to the doored slot on the NES. Then kids picked it up - mostly ironically. Eventually it stuck.

If you’re a Nintendo Switch Online subscriber, you can play any NES games available through the Nintendo Classics service directly on your original Switch or the new Switch 2. The NSO column on the main catalog page shows which games are currently available.

NSO is the easiest way. Some amazing games are available, but it’s a small portion of the entire library (about 6% as of this writing). These days many people play NES games via emulation. There are a number of high quality NES emulators available for a variety of platforms. Many will work right out of the box, no configuration needed.

There’s also Retroarch. It’s a cross-platform open source emulator that bundles a bunch of classic game systems into a single unified interface. It can be overwhelming at first, but once you get it configured it’s fantastic.

Russ over at Retro Game Corps has an easy to follow Retroarch Starter Guide - available in written or video form.

In the summer of 2023 Jeff Gerstmann embarked on a noble scientific journey. He set out to play and rank every 8-Bit Nintendo Entertainment System game release in North America.

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When putting this site together I needed something to ground the list in. Titles and release years don’t give a good place to jump in. Jeff’s rankings solved the problem. You may not agree with a particular rating. That’s OK. The point is the broader relationship.

Never played a NES game? Pick anything in the top 20 and jump in.

Curious about what makes one baseball game good and another bad? Search game titles for “baseball”, sorted by Grank. Pick two from the top of the list and two from the bottom and play them.

What makes Cobra Triangle a top 50 game, but not a top 20? Click the episode link and see what Jeff has to say.

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Jeff has never referred to his rankings as Grank. I needed something to reference where the ranking came from. “Jeff Gerstmann Rank” was too long to put in the header of a data table. “Grank, Granking, Grank’d” had the right length and right amount of dumb.

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You can support Jeff on Patreon, catch live streams on Twitch, and watch archived episodes of "The Jeff Gerstmann Show" on YouTube.

In the early days of Jeff's rankings, Vinicius Nakamura made an awesome single page website for the rankings at 8-Bit Nintendo Science. I pull a csv file from that site's Github repo with the ranking data and info to assemble a link to the YouTube episodes.

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Publisher, developer, and release year primarily come from Wikipedia. So does the information about which games can be played with a Nintendo Switch Online subscription.

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Screenshots and descriptions come from Screen Scraper. You can support them at Tipeee.

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Jeremy Parish's NES Works series is an invaluable resource for deep dives into gameplay mechanics and historical contexts. Links to episodes where he covers a particular game are scraped from YouTube. You can support Jeremy's work on Patreon.

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The NESdrunk episodes (by SNESdrunk) offer quick "Is this worth playing today" style reviews. No rankings or ratings. Links to episodes of games he has covered are scraped from YouTube.

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Game “genre” data was all over the place, from every source I checked. Eventually I gave up on pulling it from somewhere, wrote up a list of basic genres with rules and examples, then fed it all to AI for categorization. I was surprised at how well it worked.

All the data sources are pulled into templates using Astro. This generates ~750 static HTML pages, which are uploaded to inexpensive shared hosting at Namecheap. The main game catalog functionality is provided by DataTables.

Hi! My name is Jason. I've been making things (professionally and personally) on the web since the mid 90's. I have a link blog (that's not retro gaming related) at similarselection.org.

Found a broken page or bad data? I'd love to know about it. Send me an email: head.plumber@nintendotapes.info.

World Games was ranked in episode 115 of "The Jeff Gerstmann Podcast". It was also covered in episode 115 of "NES Works".