What's the single best game Nintendo has ever created?

[The_Liquid_Laser]

Jumpin said:

The_Liquid_Laser said:

The Legend of Zelda (NES)

3. Most Innovative Game - Zelda 1 is arguably the most innovative game ever made.  You have to realize, first of all, that Super Mario 1 was considered an extremely innovative game in it's day.  Think about that.  Just the fact that the screen scrolled in 1 direction and there was music playing and a second button for running and fire -- all of that was extremely new at the time.  However The Legend of Zelda and Super Mario Bros were developed at the exact same time.  Zelda had 4 way directional exploration.  It had dual purpose items that could be used for both combat and to find secrets.  Hell, it had far more secrets than any game that came before.  It was the perfect marriage between arcade action and PC depth.  It was the first console game to actually use a save state.  It was also the first major console game to use anything like hit points.  It was so freakin' innovative, that they included a hint guide with the game.  This is also why you don't start with a sword in Zelda 1.  Miyamoto wanted people to realize that this game was not like anything that had come before.

You're giving Zelda undue credit.

There were many adventure games and RPGs with 4 directional exploration before Zelda. The first such console game was "Adventure" from 1979 for the Atari 2600 which established the action-adventure genre and its primary conventions, including the 4 directional exploration across a large map that you incorrectly credit Zelda as inventing. Zelda also wasn't the first adventure game to have you start without a sword, this was actually common practice in Atari 2600 action adventure games. But Adventure (1979) was, perhaps, the first game that included hidden secrets.

There were also adventure games on Atari that had users switch between overhead and sidescrolling levels.

You can play Adventure and other earlier action adventures on Switch in the Atari Flashbacks collection.

I am very well acquainted with Adventure.  It was one of my top 50 games of all time on last year's list. 

Let me clarify the paragraph you quoted by saying that Super Mario Bros was considered an innovative game at it's time, but Zelda was actually a much more complex game that was developed at the same time.  I didn't mean to imply that Zelda invented 4-way directional exploration, and it didn't invent the idea of not starting with a sword.  Instead, it was a much more complex game than Super Mario Bros, and to make the game work they had to innovate a whole lot more.

Also Zelda 1 is a much bigger and more complex game than Adventure.  It is somewhat like comparing Contra to Call of Duty.  Yeah they are both wartime shooter games, but it takes a lot of innovation to go from Contra to Call of Duty.