Excitebike (1984 in Japan, 1985 here) was a launch-window NES game with a feature that felt impossible at the time: a track editor. Design your own course, place ramps and hazards, and race it.

Shigeru Miyamoto designed it, which explains why a game about motocross is really a game about one number. Your engine has a temperature gauge, and the whole thing is built around it. The A button is a normal throttle; B is the turbo that goes faster and heats the engine. Redline it and the bike stalls for several seconds while you sit there and watch your time go. Cross one of the cooling arrows on the track and the gauge drops. That's the entire strategy: how much turbo can you afford between cool-down strips.

The other half is the landing. Hit a ramp and you control the bike's pitch in midair with up and down, and you want the wheels level with the slope when you touch down. Come in nose-high and you lose speed. Come in badly wrong and you're thrown off and have to run back to the bike on foot while the clock runs.

Then there's Design mode, and it was remarkable. Choose from ramps, jumps, mud patches, oil slicks and cooling strips, lay out a full course, and ride it immediately. Without the Famicom Data Recorder, which never came out here, you couldn't save it. Lose power and your masterpiece was gone. That didn't stop anybody.

Simple, endlessly replayable, and that editor planted a "make your own levels" seed in a lot of young brains years before anyone shipped a game about doing it.

A pure, perfect early NES game, and the rare launch title nobody has to make excuses for.