People forget how deep the NES sports library got. My shelf alone has over fifty sports cartridges, and a surprising number still hold up. The reason there are so many is unglamorous: sports games were cheap to commission, sold steadily, and didn't need a license to exist, so every publisher made several. What's surprising is how many of them are good.

The highlights:

  • Baseball Stars is the one that mattered. SNK put a battery in the cartridge and used it to let you create and save your own team, name every player, and pay them out of a budget that came from your winnings. Players improved as they played. In 1989 nothing else on a console remembered your franchise like that, and everything since has copied it.
  • Blades of Steel is Konami hockey: fast, loose with the rules, and famous for dropping you into a one-on-one fistfight whenever tempers flare. It also has digitized speech, which in 1988 was worth the purchase on its own.
  • Double Dribble is remembered for the zoomed-in slam-dunk cutscene on every inside score, an animation so good people took the shot just to watch it. The clock stops while it plays, which the game does not mention.
  • Ice Hockey lets you build your line from skinny, average and fat skaters, each trading speed for power and puck control. It is a real strategic choice hiding inside a silly presentation, and it's still the best pick-up-and-play game on the shelf.
  • Pro Wrestling gave the internet "A WINNER IS YOU", and underneath the broken English is a surprisingly deep grappling system with six distinct wrestlers.
  • R.C. Pro-Am is Rare's isometric radio-control racer, with weapons, upgradeable cars and letters spelling NINTENDO scattered on the track.
  • NES Open Tournament Golf stars Mario himself, tiny caddie and all, and has the cleanest three-click swing meter on the console.
  • Rad Racer shipped with red and blue 3-D glasses and a mode that actually works. Square made it, and Nasir Gebelli programmed it, two years before Final Fantasy.

Plus a deep bench: Bases Loaded, R.B.I. Baseball, Jordan vs Bird, Skate or Die, Nintendo World Cup, Super Dodge Ball, Ivan "Ironman" Stewart's Super Off Road, and a whole rack of golf (Lee Trevino, Jack Nicklaus, Greg Norman). The NES quietly ran the family rec room.