If NES games were made today

Games were different on the Nintendo Entertainment System. They were often difficult and obtuse. Either developers had a higher opinion of gamers, or we were just better at games.

Today, studios look for every chance to make their products appeal to a mass market. They also try to nickel and dime users at every opportunity. That got artist Hugues Johnson thinking: What if today’s developers made yesterday’s NES games?

That led him to create a gallery of images of NES games that he slightly tweaked to show how weird many of today’s tropes would look in classic titles like The Legend of Zelda.

Take a look at the gallery, and then stick around for a quick interview with Johnson:

The Legend of Zelda was all about exploration. That’s because the game provided you with very few hints. Players would have to explore if they were ever going to understand what was going on and where to go next. Today’s Zeldas all have chatty sidekicks that provide often obvious hints and pointers.
Tetris is one of the all-time great puzzle games, but what if the game had a casual mode? Well, it might show you some smart places to land your blocks. Why play games when they can play themselves?
If you played The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword for the Wii, then you know that every time you started the game back up, it would tell you how much every coin is worth. It is infuriating. In the original Zelda, the game just added 5 rupees to your total and assumed you were capable of math.
While most games were more difficult back then, they were also less obsessed with realism. In Tecmo Bowl, for example, each team had 30 players and no one could ever get injured. In today’s Madden NFL games, it’s common to lose a player to injury for an entire season.
Zelda enabled gamers to have three separate save files on one cartridge. When a player was finished, they could delete that file and start a new one whenever they wanted. On the Nintendo 3DS, Capcom released Resident Evil: The Mercenaries 3D, which had one save file that players could not delete.
Nintendo packed Super Mario Bros. with secrets. One of the best things about the game was discovering secrets and sharing them with friends. Here is a less subtle version of that.
The original NES Zelda had many walls that the player could destroy with a bomb, but nothing in the game would visually indicate which walls those were. Now, Nintendo hints at which walls are bombable by putting a visible crack in them.
Classic adventure game Shadowgate is known for its difficulty. The whole point is to use every tool to figure out how to solve a puzzle. Johnson imagines a version of the game that let’s you skip all of that with a “hint” option.
What if RBI Baseball had in-game advertising?
The boxing game Punch-Out!! required experimentation and precise timing. Maybe it would have been easier if the game prompted you with buttons to inform you when to punch.
Nonbunaga’s Ambition is an early turn-based strategy series. Now imagine if it needed servers to work.
Metroid was one of the original atmospheric and moody video games. You had to scour the planet to find all of the extras and hidden items. It would have taken players out of the experience if disembodied letters popped up every time you found something as they are wont to do in modern games.
Doesn’t everyone hate when a game pauses in the middle of the action to make you read a text box that explains how to move and jump?
OK, actually, achievements on the NES is an awesome idea. I hope Nintendo does this some day.
If NES games were made today
The worst part is that you know if Square Enix made this today, they would still charge full price for the game.
It’s not enough to have a game where you beat dudes up. Now, you have to beat dudes up while maintaining a 50,000-hit combo.
This one is blasphemy. Back in the day, video games used codes to give you bonuses and cheats. Today, mobile games do the same thing with in-app purchases for $1.99.
If you died in Castlevania, you go back to the beginning. Today, most games have a checkpoint every 30 seconds.
NES developers actually had to ship games that were completely finished. That’s a crazy thought. Modern developers just ship whatever and then update it with patches later.
Metal Gear creator Hideo Kojima loves cutscenes. I’m surprised his first Metal Gear didn’t have 45 minute-long codec conversations.

“I first got the idea for the gallery after finishing The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword,” Johnson told GamesBeat. “Don’t get me wrong — I enjoyed the game but was also disappointed by the lack of exploration and excessive hand-holding. It got me thinking about how much the series has changed over the years.”

Hughues JohnsonJohnson said that the first Zelda simply dropped players into an environment and let them figure out what was going on.

“Players could explore every inch of the map before entering the first dungeon,” said Johnson. “As the series evolved, it became more restrictive to the point where players can only visit areas at specific times.”

Johnson recognizes that by making games easier, they can reach a wider audience.

“I don’t completely blame the game industry for these new trends because they’re responding to the market,” he said. “If easier games sell then that’s what they’ll make.”

Johnson lives in Chicago where he works as a software developer. In his spare time, he host The Retro League podcast, which is a weekly show about classic games.