The mission to play them all: How this man plans to review every NES game ever

Video game journalist Jeff Gerstmann set out on an epic quest: to play every single Nintendo Entertainment System video game released in North America.

A video game journalist started a quest to play every game released on the original Nintendo Entertainment System.

Jeff Gerstmann started playing every game released for the NES in August 2023 and is set to complete his goal this, he told CTV Your Morning in an interview Friday.

“I found that people that would say, ‘oh these games are the worst and they’re hilarious,’ and all this other stuff,” Gerstmann said. “I was like, ‘oh no, there are hundreds of games that are worse than this.’”

On the flipside, he felt that people often put some games on pedestals for no good reason.

He says his mission was designed to judge these old games for himself, rather than just following what groups of people were saying online.

Gerstmann said he watched his friend playing Captain Skyhawk, a game developed by the studio behind Goldeneye 007 and released in 1990. The gameplay consists of flying a jet and shooting obstacles.

He says he remembers the game being a “really dynamic looking game,” and standing out. After going back to play it, Gerstmann says that Captain Skyhawk is a middle of the road title: not the best, nor the worst.

“Once the (NES) became popular in the late ’80s early ’90s, the flood gates opened for a bunch of just very questionable releases,” he said.

One of the biggest changes that he sees with modern video games is them often being connected to the internet and encouraging social, online play.

Gerstmann says that “Mega Man 2,” developed by Capcom and released in 1988, is the best game. However, its not his favourite.

Bionic Commando, released in 1987 and developed by the same company, is a highlight for him, especially for its grappling hook mechanic.

Rygar is a 1986 platformer designed by Tecmo, which Gerstmann says was one of the first open-world experiences developed for a console game. Open-world games have become almost ubiquitous in modern gaming. He likes Rygar for its “rich world to explore, its crazy and hard to figure out sometimes, but I really latched onto it.”

River City Ransom, released in 1989 and developed by Technos Japan is another favourite. It’s a “story about two high school friends and one of their girlfriends gets kidnapped,” Gerstmann said. “They (make) their way across town beating up gangs to save her.”

His follow-up quest will be to evaluate games for the Nintendo 64 system, which will be a walk down memory lane for him as he reviewed many of them when they were being released.

“My memory of them is that most of them are terrible, we’ll see how it holds up.”