Metroid (1986 in Japan, 1987 here) felt like nothing else on the system: lonely, eerie, and open. No hand-holding, no straight line, just the alien depths of Zebes and a series of locked doors waiting for an upgrade you hadn't found yet.

It came out of Nintendo R&D1 under Gunpei Yokoi, the group behind the Game Boy and the Game & Watch line, and it shows in how little the game explains itself. You start with a beam and a jump. Everything after that is earned: the morph ball to roll under a gap, missiles to open red doors, the high jump, the ice beam that turns an enemy into a platform you can stand on. That last one is the cleverest item on the cartridge, because it makes your weapon into a level-design tool and several rooms are impossible without it.

The loop of explore, hit a wall, find the thing, double back and open the world wider is half the reason the whole genre got named after it. What's easy to forget is how hostile the map is about it. There is no map. Corridors repeat by design, Norfair and Brinstar reuse the same handful of tiles in different palettes, and the game expects you to build the atlas in your own head or on paper.

The Japanese release was on the Famicom Disk System, which could save. When it crossed to cartridge for the West the save went away and passwords took its place, which is why a generation of us carried scraps of paper with 24 characters on them. Feed it garbage and it sometimes still boots, which is how JUSTIN BAILEY escaped into playground legend.

Then there's the ending. Finish fast enough and the armored bounty hunter takes the helmet off, and Samus Aran is a woman. In 1986 that reveal landed like a thunderclap, and it worked precisely because the game had told you nothing about her for hours.

The atmosphere is what stuck with me: cold, quiet, and a little bit scary.