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Nintendo's Famicom platformer combined momentum-based jumping with levels that taught their own rules in sequence. Bundled with the console in the West, it sold in the tens of millions and became the genre's reference point.
This is the entry usually cited when arguing that games can be designed rather than merely built. The relationship between a responsive character, readable level geometry and the ordering of new ideas became teachable, and it remains the standard worked example in design courses and analysis.
Released with battery-backed saving on Japan's disk add-on, Nintendo's action adventure dropped players into a large map with almost no instruction and rewarded methodical exploration and note-taking.
Persistent saving turned home games into something you returned to for weeks rather than something completed or failed in an evening. Combined with a non-linear world and deliberately sparse guidance, it established the action-adventure form and demonstrated that exploration itself could be the reward.
