This list of games will cover many generations of consoles and computers that all have one simple thing in common: they should have waited at least one generation longer before being released.  This is somewhat confusing; as we look back now, it’s hard to realize what was released too soon since most of these games were released at least two decades ago.  As someone that has lived through, and enjoyed, gaming since nearly the early days (I was playing on Pong machines prior to getting an Atari 2600 in the early 80’s), this list is a personal point of view–yours may vary quite a bit, in which case please by all means tell me in the comments.  From the Atari 2600 to the Super Nintendo, are all fair game for this article. Have at it retro games fans!

First up is the venerable Atari 2600 and a title that often has the gaming crash of the 80’s laid at its feet (along with E.T of course).  Pac-Man.  This game, as proved by later releases, could have easily been done on the Atari 2600. I mean there isn’t all that much to it.  A maze, some enemies, a yellow circle you control and some dots.  How hard could it be to screw that up?  Well, Atari certainly did.  The original Pac-Man was horrible and flickered beyond belief and you would not be thought badly of for not recognizing it as Pac-Man upon first viewing.  This is just horrible.  More powerful consoles of the time would have been a better suit for this game, even the later iterations (Ms. Pac-Man and Jr. Pac-Man) or better yet, they would have been better suited for the Atari 5200 or even Atari 7800.  Of course, money talks and screw the competition – Atari had the rights and Pac-Man was going to be released on the 2600 when it hit, quality be damned.

Number two on this list goes to Nightshade on the Nintendo Entertainment System.  Konami was all over the place with their NES games, producing everything from action titles like Contra and Gradius to adventure titles like Adventures of Bayou Billy.  Then there was the curious release of Nightshade, an Ultra Games (Konami subsidiary to get around licensing limitations set by Nintendo) release.  What we have here is a game that was unique and interesting but it was held back by the hardware pushing it.  Nightshade certainly could have been huge…had gamers been able to tell what the hell was going on.  The Nintendo NES only had a handful of colors on the screen at time, chosen out of a slightly larger pool of colors.  This doesn’t allow for much shading in the graphics, nor colors that really give the graphics a sense of foreboding, both things that would have benefited this adventure/role playing hybrid by Ultra.  Had they waited to release Nightshade on the Super Nintendo or the Sega Genesis, it would have probably been a hit as both consoles had a more “mature” audience available as well as graphical capabilities to do the subject matter justice.

Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective, and just about every other Full Motion Video game released on the Sega CD and Turbo Grafx-16 CD-ROM platform.  These games are all on hardware that is horribly inadequate for what they tried to do.  The Turbo Grafx-16 CD-ROM releases had slightly better colors and video quality over the Sega CD, but both suffered from low frame rates and long loading times.  I personally enjoy these games, they are like “Choose Your Own Adventure” games, and unfortunately not many other gaming fans felt the same.  Had these games been held back till at least the Playstation and Sega Saturn days then we might have had a slightly different outcome for this genre.

Continuing down the route of generalizing a set of games I come to the first generation Game Boy and every action/quick reflexes game released for it.  All of these games should have been held back till the next iteration of the Game Boy, the Game Boy Pocket, which had a better screen that didn’t blur whenever you got the light source off just a little bit.  Sure we got great titles like Super Mario Land and a few DC Comics games mixed with more than a handful of original releases but we couldn’t enjoy them till at least the next hardware iteration that Nintendo released.

StarFox for the Super Nintendo finishes out this list of games released before their time.  Okay, most of you reading this are probably calling foul already, but think about this before you flame me in the comments:  StarFox, while fun, is horribly slow and un-detailed compared to the other games on the Super Nintendo.  Had Nintendo held StarFox back to release on the Nintendo 64, it could have been amazing, even for a first generation release.  Sure the Super FX chip helped, since without it Star Fox simply would not work on the SNES, but it wasn’t able to help enough.

There are plenty more examples and those will be dealt with in the future.  If you can think of any that you definitely want to see featured, mention them!

Carl Williams

It is time gaming journalism takes its rightful place as proper sources and not fanboys giving free advertising. If you wish to support writers like Carl please use the links below. https://www.paypal.me/WCW https://www.patreon.com/CarlWilliams