The Best/Most Noteworthy Games from 1985

In 1985 the resurrection of the North American video gaming market began with the third console generation. Nintendo introduced its NES to gamers in the western hemisphere - and marketed its console in the USA as a toy. As it were, that was the only way to get the NES on American store shelves at all, following the desastrous events of the market's collapse a couple of years before.

In Japan, Sega released its Sega Master System in an attempt to grab some of Nintendo's market shares. For the years to follow, Sega would be Nintendo's harshest competitor on the home console market, but would only succeed to put Nintendo on the number two spot in Europe and South America.

One major difference between the two contestants was the huge third party support that Sega would gather in comparison to Nintendo. That was largely due to Nintendo's stringent licensing policies which, after the NES's skyrocketing success, effectively allowed Nintendo to monopolize the video gaming market. Although deemed somewhat illegal, Nintendo insisted on its policies in order to prevent another flood of subpar games, which ultimately led to the 1983 video gaming crash. As it turned out, Nintendo's licensing policies, in loosened form, became the standard for the whole industry for the following years and in fact prevented oversaturation like at the time of the crash.

Also in 1985 Atari and Commodore released their new home computer systems ST and Amiga respectively. Especially in Europe those two became were popular and together with the C64 would contest other gaming platforms quite successfully.

Influencial games from 1985 are Nintendo's "Super Mario Bros." which became the definitve blueprint for the jump and run genre, "Elite" which is deemed the grandfather of space trading games and the puzzle game "Tetris" which would later be a major smash on Nintendo's handheld console Gameboy.