Back in the early NES days, the way Nintendo presented their games, all bunched together in an “official” lineup that you’d see repeated to you with every new game you bought, it’s like those games were the straight-out canon. Straying from the first-party line was sort of a risk; a trip into the unknown. Outside of some major players like Capcom and Konami, no one really talked about the “other” publishers very much. And yet every company had its own template, to distinguish its lineup from anyone else’s. You could tell a Konami game by the gradiated silver border; a Capcom one by the weird perspecive grid thing, with the box art centered on top of it; a Broderbund one by the entire bottom of the front cover being silver, leaving a little room for an illustration up top.

Now, most of the major companies had appealing templates, with reasonably appealing illustrations — and most of the games themselves looked reasonably appealing. If you didn’t understand exactly what the games were, from a title, a painting, and a couple of screenshots, you could hazard a guess based on the company’s other games and be intrigued. Some companies, though, they just creeped the hell out of me. Like Data East or Acclaim.

You look at boxes like this, and your brow furrows. In particular, the ones toward the bottom — Star Voyager and Winter ames and 3D Worldrunner — have layouts sort of similar, though not identical, to Nintendo’s “black box” template. Star Voyager’s screenshots show red lines on a black background, with what looks like an NES pad at the bottom of the screen. The Winter Games art depicts glowing neon outlines of people in snowsuits, leaving tracers. You look at these boxes, or any ads for Acclaim’s bizarre lineup, and you wonder. Mind that there weren’t any decent reviews out there for third-party games. To find out what these game are, you’d have to shell out money for them — and yet you’re ten years old. You don’t have fifty bucks, and if you did you’d probably spend it on something “safe”, from Nintendo or Konami, instead. These strange boxes will remain on shelves, and in the ads in game magaines, staring at you, making you uneasy, their mysteries locked out of your reach.

I mean, what on (or off) Earth is Lunar Pool? I’m reminded of when, as a boy, I was left in Epcot Center to wander unsupervised for half a day.

Now we know what most of these games are. We can go back and investigate the ones we’ve missed. We no longer have these page-sized masses of mystery glaring at us. And yet, even if you do dig in — have you seen how glitchy Karnov is? Or Breakthru? Are these games fun the way Konami’s and Nintendo’s games are fun? Is there something that no one’s explained to us? It still feels risky — a little dangerous, a little unnerving — to wade into these waters. Maybe those older, cooler, clearly wiser kids who skateboarded and could play arcade games like I never could said and did all sorts of things I didn’t understand — maybe they’d understand them. Maybe when I was older too they’d not seem so alien to me.

Today we’d just reject the games as crap. Look at the reputation Deadly Towers has achieved, thanks to Seanbaby and Something Awful. And yet — not having played it — to me that game was one of the most mysterious things on the NES. The box art, the screenshots — they seemed to hint at something beyond my grasp. So many times I almost went for it; after asking the Kay-Bee clerk for one last look at the box, I’d tell him this time I’d buy the game. I never quite dared. Instead, I have almost a full collection of Nintendo black-box games, and early Konami and Capcom releases. Ah well.