I recently rediscovered my old NES unit that had been put in storage around 20 years ago. A gold game cartridge was still inside - the Legend of Zelda. Naturally, I had to play it. I found it was like riding a bike and even after 20 years remembered several of the secret cave locations without having to resort to random (or systematic) bombing rocks and burning bushes. Computer games have gotten vastly more sophisticated in terms of graphics, but there is something about the gameplay on multiple levels that more contemporary games don’t quite capture.
I can remember enough secret caves that I don’t have to carpet-bomb to get most of them, but there are always a few where I go the entire length of a screen only to remember that it’s actually the next screen over that looks just like it, and dangit, that one was only “Pay me for the new door charge” anyway, and where the heck was that last heart again?
The dirty tricks, though, I remember those. Like, if you leave one enemy alive in each zone, then they never respawn. And the game remembers how many enemies are present in each zone, but not which ones, so you can often clear out all of the easy monsters but leave the hard ones, leave the zone and return, and clear out the easy monsters again.
I didn’t have an NES growing up (my parents got me a Master System instead for God knows what reason), and though I played the original Legend of Zelda a few times at a friend’s house, it wasn’t until I got it on GBA as an adult that I finally beat it.
As a young, impressionable high schooler not all that far removed from the Atari days, the thing I liked about The Legend of Zelda was that I could reach the end even though I missed some things and didn’t know all the secrets. (Never saw any point to “dirty tricks”; none of the enemies were especially hard to beat.) The first few times, I didn’t have the slightest idea where the quarter-damage ring and the best-priced magic shield were and still was able to conquer it. There were a few frustrating spots, but I never found myself completely in over my head. I could tell that the programming team really knew their stuff, and I appreciated it.
Second quest…that’s another story. Didn’t seriously attempt it until I could look up all the maps on GameFAQs. Damn, that was murder. You couldn’t pay me to do it again.
Level two dungeon … snakes … around and around and around and around and around until we had enough rupees for the ring … then around and around and around and around and around until we had enough rupees for the shield … [sigh] … fond memories indeed …
Golden Axe Warrior for the Master System is derivative of Zelda 1, and is arguably superior. For example, enemies slain stay slain for that save file.
Golvellius for the MS is decent, too.
The NES naturally has some derivatives, too, like SNK’s Crystalis and Capcom’s Willow movie tie-in. The latter is notably similar to the Zelda later released for the SNES, to the extent that Nintendo were surely aware of it and liked it enough to rip it off in kind. Capcom later developed several official Zelda games, but cross-referencing them with Willow yields no shared staff.
Hey, if your parents bought the system, you can’t complain. Mom told me that she didn’t mind me having a Nintendo, but that she wouldn’t pay for it. So I had to save up babysitting money until I had $106.99 (exact change!) to buy it myself. Though she did then give me a few cartridges for Christmas and birthday presents.
And even then, I never actually played any of the Zelda games until I was an adult. Nor Metroid, nor a bunch of other classics, and there were others I only played at friends’ houses (any Mega Man, SMB 2 and 3). My game library was pitifully small.
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My mother didn’t want video games in our house period, saying it would distract us from school. God, was she right.
My parents made us do chores to earn an NES. We were the last kids in the neighborhood to get one. We had a chart that was filled out as we worked.
Then my brother got appendicitis when the chart was about 2/3 full. And they just bought it right then. Even though we got it early I remember feeling cheated for some reason. Like all our previous work was a waste.
Are you sure? I know that if I hadn’t had video games, I would just have found something else to do when not doing my homework. 
There is one exception to that rule those stupid monsters with the shield that you would find in later levels. One room on level 8 was especially bad because it had the diamond of blocks in the center which limited where you could move.
The mages in the dungeon were annoying, too, just because you couldn’t always anticipate where they would re-appear, and they did a ton of damage if they hit. So much easier to kill a couple of blobs, re-enter, and kill a couple more blobs (though of course you still needed a strong enough sword to kill a blob without just splitting it).
And obstacles made the knights easier, not harder, because you knew that when they hit the obstacle they had to turn. So you could camp on the other side and wait for them to hit it.
I was terrified by the giant tape worms that ate your shield. If I remember you had to run around with no shield until you bought a replacement. What a real pain. I’d do all I could to keep away from them.
You still had a shield, but it was just the starter shield. You could block arrows and rocks with it, but not any serious projectiles like mage spells or centaur swords.
And I always thought those things looked more like a stack of pancakes than like a tapeworm.