Month: February 2026

This is Console History, a special sub-series of my more general History Lessons series, covering console role-playing games, action role-playing games, Metroidvanias, and action-adventure games in nominally chronological order starting in the late 1980s. The chronology is garbled in the beginning as the scope of the series expanded, but it gets more organized later on. As always, you may click on images to view larger versions.

Console History has just been reorganized. In an effort to bring the haphazard early entries — assembled alongside a growing scope for the series — into a better semblance of chronology, I’ve looked through the entire catalogs of early consoles like the Famicom/NES and PC Engine/Turbografx-16 to make sure I caught all the games I might want to include. That means we’re embarking on what should hopefully be the last detour from the nominal timeline, to fill in a few more early games that I missed the first time.

For this entry we’re going almost all the way back to the beginning. The earliest game I’ve covered in this series is The Legend of Zelda, which released on February 21, 1986 in Japan as a launch title for the Famicom Disk System add-on to Nintendo’s Famicom. Less than two months later, on April 14, 1986, The Mysterious Murasame Castle released in Japan, also for the Famicom Disk System. Unlike Zelda, it wasn’t localized outside of Japan until decades later.

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