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.

Nintendo Switch Online subscribers can play NSO-available NES games on Switch or Switch 2. The NSO column on the catalog shows what's currently available.

NSO's easiest, but covers only ~6% of the library. Most people use emulation instead - plenty of NES emulators work out of the box, no config needed.

Or use Retroarch, a cross-platform open source frontend bundling many classic systems. Overwhelming at first, fantastic once set up.

Russ at Retro Game Corps has a good Retroarch Starter Guide (written or video).

In summer 2023 Jeff Gerstmann set out to play and rank every 8-bit NES release in North America.

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Building this site, I needed something to ground the list. Titles and years don't give you a place to start - Jeff's rankings did. Disagree with a rating? Fine. The relationships between games matter more than any single score.

New to NES? Pick anything in the top 20.

Curious what separates a good baseball game from a bad one? Search “baseball,” sort by Grank, and play two from the top and two from the bottom.

What makes Cobra Triangle top 50 but not top 20? Click the episode link and find out.

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Jeff has never called his rankings “Grank.” I needed a short label. “Jeff Gerstmann Rank” was too long for a table header. “Grank, Granking, Grank’d” had the right length and right amount of dumb.

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Support Jeff on Patreon, catch streams on Twitch, or watch "The Jeff Gerstmann Show" archives on YouTube.

Early on, Vinicius Nakamura built a single-page site for the rankings at 8-Bit Nintendo Science. I pull a csv from that site's GitHub repo for ranking data and YouTube episode links.

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Publisher, developer, and release year come from Wikipedia - same source for Switch Online availability.

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Screenshots and descriptions come from Screen Scraper. Support them on Tipeee.

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Jeremy Parish's NES Works series is invaluable for gameplay and history deep-dives. Episode links are scraped from YouTube. Support Jeremy on Patreon.

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NESdrunk (by SNESdrunk) gives quick "is this worth playing today" reviews, no ratings. Episode links scraped from YouTube.

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Genre data was inconsistent across every source. I wrote up genre rules and examples and had AI categorize against them. Worked better than expected.

Data feeds into Astro templates, generating ~750 static pages, hosted cheap on Namecheap shared hosting. DataTables powers the catalog.

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 broken page or bad data? 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".