1986 is the year that home consoles started to truly surpass arcade gaming. While coin-op experienced something of a Golden Age from 1978 (marked by the release of Space Invaders) through to 1985 (with Atari's Paperboy), it was 1986 when the power of the arcade truly started to waver. That's largely down to the release of the Famicom Disk System for the NES; the peripheral unleashed a wave of innovation and creativity, with the initial shift away from cartridges to floppy disks giving developers a new way to approach game creation.
Perhaps it's no surprise that 1986 is headlined by two Nintendo games, with the company developing killer exclusives to help sell the Famicom to the weary masses of NES owners in Japan. First up, you had the debut of The Legend of Zelda – a vast, open-world game quite unlike anything at the time. Link's first adventure is now considered to be the spiritual forerunner to the action-RPG as we know it today, but at the time it was renowned for its nonlinear approach to navigation, exploration, and progression. Of course, the success of The Legend of Zelda would also set Shigeru Miyamoto and Takashi Tezuka's creative partnership in stone – the duo first collaborated on Super Mario Bros. a year earlier, and would continue to do so for decades after.
The other game that helped Nintendo dominate 1986 was the original Metroid, yet another nonlinear adventure for the Famicom that took the concept of open exploration and freeform progression into the mainstream. Link and Samus Aran making their debuts would be enough to define any year on their own, but of course 1986 didn't let up there. The Famicom was also home to another game that prioritised the search and discovery style of gameplay that's now so popular today – the original Castlevania. The Metroidvania genre was thus born in 1986, with both titles launching in August and September, respectively, upending the platformer and adventure frameworks entirely.
What makes 1986 the best year in gaming isn't just that it was home to so many influential titles and icons that still resonate to this day, but that it was packed with amazing games to play – even if the Famicom was out of reach. Sega was busy promoting Out Run and Wonder Boy; Taito was making waves with Bubble Bobble and Arkanoid, which breathed new life into the concept popularised by Atari's Breakout a decade earlier; and Enix unleashed Dragon Quest, one of the most important JRPGs of all time.
1986 pushed home console gaming forward, in a way that can be difficult to see or appreciate now. But the sprawling open spaces of The Legend of Zelda, the moody aesthetic and twisting aesthetic of Metroid and Castlevania, and the crisp Sega Blue Skies of Out Run were unlike anything players of the day had seen or experienced before. The release of the Famicom may have inspired so many of these fantastic games from Nintendo and its publishing partners, but the truth is that 1986 is the year where developers finally started to push on beyond the boundaries of arcade gaming and start striving for real innovation in home console gaming; we're still feeling the impact 1986 had on the industry through gaming today.
Games that defined 1986
