Hard to overstate this one. After the 1983 crash gutted American gaming, Super Mario Bros. (1985) arrived bundled with the NES and quietly resurrected the whole industry.

Shigeru Miyamoto and Takashi Tezuka built the template every platformer still borrows from: tight controls, secrets rewarding curiosity, and World 1-1 — the most-studied minute of level design ever made, teaching you the entire game without a word of text.

For a lot of us it was simply the first game. The warp pipes, the fire flower, the run-button physics, that overworld theme that's now wired permanently into a few generations of brains. I keep my copy not because it's rare, but because it's the one that started it all.