Licensed games on the NES were a coin flip, and which side it landed on usually came down to who made it, not whose face was on the box. The economics explain most of it: a licensor sold the name to whoever paid, the publisher subcontracted the actual game to whatever studio was free, and the release date was set by the film's marketing calendar rather than by whether the thing was finished.

The notorious LJN shelf. LJN was a toy company first, and it treated cartridges like toys: buy a hot property, job the development out, ship it while the poster is still up. Their rainbow-arch label became shorthand for exactly that. My collection has Nightmare on Elm Street, Friday the 13th (legendarily cryptic, with a map nobody could parse and a fog level that has ended more playthroughs than Jason has), Jaws, Back to the Future, Terminator 2, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, The Karate Kid, and Uncanny X-Men. Acclaim bought LJN in 1990 and kept the label going as a budget imprint. Famous now for being hard, broken, or baffling, and weirdly beloved for it.

The Capcom Disney gold. On the other end, Capcom's Disney deal produced some of the system's best games, because Capcom developed them in-house with the same people making Mega Man. Beyond DuckTales I've got Chip 'n Dale: Rescue Rangers (two-player, and you can pick your partner up and throw them), TaleSpin, The Little Mermaid, Adventures in the Magic Kingdom, and Mickey Mousecapade, which Hudson Soft actually built and Capcom published, and which is the odd one out in tone as a result.

And the surprises. Sunsoft's Batman: The Video Game is an all-time NES action game, with a wall jump borrowed from Ninja Gaiden and a Naoki Kodaka soundtrack that has nothing to do with the film and is better for it. Konami's Tiny Toon Adventures and Goonies II shine. The Simpsons trilogy (Bart vs. the Space Mutants, Bart vs. the World, Bartman) is pure 1991 Bartmania. RoboCop and Willow round it out.

The lesson the NES taught a generation: read the developer, not the franchise.