The most memorable characters from old-school Nintendo games

Mario is the face of Nintendo. He’s the most popular video game character ever. The brand is built on his back. Bob Hoskins and Captain Lou Albano played him! Mario rules. Super Mario 64 is the best video game ever. What else do we need to say?

Hey, in the original Donkey Kong arcade game, “Mario” was known as “Jumpman.” As such, we haven’t broken our one character per franchise rule. With DK, we’re thinking more about his own Donkey Kong Country series. With his fashionable red tie, Donkey is a better character when he’s on the side of good and not kidnapping ladies and carrying them to the top of construction sites.

Princess Zelda may be the titular character, but Link is the hero of the series. Perhaps second only to Mario as a Nintendo protagonist, the Zelda games are some of the most beloved across the various Nintendo consoles. He even got us to care about ocarinas for a minute.

Kirby is our favorite little pink puffball (sorry, Jigglypuff). The way he sucks things in and gains their powers? Kirby is delightful in any and all iterations. He might get on that Mario/Link level if only he had more memorable villains. Some may argue he’s there anyway.

Mario is a stomping machine, and Link knows his way around a sword, but when it comes to futuristic weaponry, nobody in classic Nintendo can hold a candle to Samus. The hero of the Metroid series is a true badâss. Plus, Samus was at the center of one of the early video game surprises when it turned out that the dynamo behind the helmet was actually female.

Mega Man, or Rockman in Japan, is at the front of a series of popular (and difficult!) games. The humanoid robot is one of many robots of a similar ilk, but only Mega Man gets his name in the title. Take that, Ice Man! You’ve got nothing on Mega Man and his skills.

Does this dog have a name? We don’t know, and we don’t care. All we know is this dude thinks it’s just sooooo funny when he can’t shoot a duck. Naturally, this leads to us trying to shoot him, but the dog proves to be impervious to bullets. Duck Hunt is one of the first Nintendo games many of us played. We met that dog basically the same day we met Mario. He’s an icon. A very smug icon.

There’s an eclectic crew of memorable characters in the Star Fox series, and Star Fox 64 is one of the best games on that platform. And with all due respect to Falco and Slippy, Fox leads the way. He’s the hero, after all, and the one that gets his name in the title. We also get to play as him, which is way better than playing as Slippy.

Admittedly, the TV version of Pokemon is tilting the scales here. In the Pokemon games, you don’t start with a Pikachu. And yet, we have to admit he’s the first that comes to mind before we think of Bulbasaur, Squirtle, or Charizard. Plus, Pikachu is in Super Smash Bros., and we’re pretty sure he’s around in Pokemon Snap. He’s the face of the franchise, for better or worse.

Finally, a villain! Look, Pit may be the protagonist of the Kid Icarus series. We don’t care. This dude is named “Eggplant Wizard.” He’s a one-eyed wizard with a love of eggplants. He turns Pit into an eggplant with his staff. The Eggplant Wizard is a true cult icon of early Nintendo. How could we resist espousing his many charms?

Mike Tyson is the most famous boxer in Punch-Out!!, but he’s also a real person, so he doesn’t count. If you weren’t that good at the game, you may have never seen Soda Popinski or King Hippo. Glass Joe is the very first boxer you face. He’s also eminently beatable. If you have ever played Punch-Out!! for even a second, you know Glass Joe.

Who doesn’t like a vampire hunter, be it Buffy Summers or Abraham Lincoln? There’s also Simon Belmont of Castlevania fame. In the series' first game, way back in the NES days, Belmont takes down Count Dracula. There have been many Castlevania games since, and Belmont became the main character of a TV show.

Captain Falcon is the main character in the F-Zero racing series, though racing games are often thought of more for the cars than the characters. Perhaps that’s why Nintendo’s idea of making Falcon the face of Super Nintendo didn’t work. Mario was still around, after all. Nevertheless, the F-Zero series is Nintendo’s big racing game effort, and Captain Falcon did get a boost when he showed up in the first Smash Brothers game.

OK, so we have decided that some characters are so inextricably linked they basically qualify as one character. Banjo and Kazooie are two such characters. After all, their game is called Banjo-Kazooie. Banjo carries Kazooie around in his backpack. They are always together and always working together. It’s weird to think of one without the other. Hence, they are together for this.

Turok is a dinosaur hunter. How could you not remember a dinosaur hunter? Plus, his game — fittingly called Turok: Dinosaur Hunter — is an underrated Nintendo 64 game. While the sequels maybe didn’t land as hard as they should have, that first game put Turok in our heads forever.

Remember, we are saying memorable, so that doesn’t always mean best. Conker is a little red squirrel that debuted in Diddy Kong Racing of all games. Then, he got a cutesy solo effort for Game Boy Color. After that, things took a turn. Rare gave us Conker’s Bad Fur Day. Suddenly, the cute squirrel was an alcoholic and the star of a raunchy video game for adults. Honestly, Conker’s Bad Fur Day is kind of a cheap, lazy attempt to be edgy, but it was memorable.

Goldeneye for Nintendo 64 ruled. It also starred James Bond, who is not a video game character. Perfect Dark is basically the follow-up to Goldeneye but without the intellectual property. That means we got an original story and an original protagonist. That would be Joanna Dark, who may not look like Pierce Brosnan but still starred in a really good game.

Marth is way bigger as a character in Japan. The first Fire Emblem game wasn’t released until it got a revamped version in 2020 to celebrate the original game’s 30th anniversary. However, the prince character was still en route to starring in an extensive series of games. For many Americans, Marth was introduced to them by the Smash Bros. games. In Japan, he’s memorable.

Chrono Trigger is considered one of the best video games ever and a revolutionary turn for Super Nintendo. While there are multiple playable characters, Crono is at the center. Sure, his name is a little confusing since it is one letter off from the game title, but he’s still one of the faces of the game, if not the face. He may not talk, but Crono is the first character we think of when we think of Chrono Trigger.

Bill and Lance from Contra are somewhat memorable because Contra is a classic, but off the top of your head, do you know which is Bill and which is Lance? For Contra Force, you got to choose one character to play alongside Burns, the team leader. One of them is a demolition expert. Also, his name is Beans. That’s how you stick in the memories of video game players.

Most wrestling games are based on real wrestlers. Not Tecmo World Wrestling. That game features fictional wrestlers such as Akira Dragon and Dr. Guildo. You can’t play as Blue King, also known as the Earl of Doom. He’s the non-playable big bad guy. You have to best the Blue King to win, and who doesn’t remember a guy whose nickname is “Earl of Doom"?

The Clayfighter games have many notable characters and some of which are quickly forgotten. Bad Mr. Frosty is probably the face of the franchise, but the first Clayfighter game got ported to Sega Genesis pretty quickly, so we decided to focus on a character from the two games that are Nintendo exclusives. The best of those is “T-Hoppy,” admittedly just a parody of the Terminator but a rabbit. Hey, we remember him.

Here’s another duo we couldn’t separate. The game is called Pocky & Rocky, after all. Their names rhyme and everything. Besides, you try and separate a little girl from her tanuki friend. The duo belongs together, and so they shall be.

OK, so this one takes some massaging. Metal Gear was a computer game first. However, it debuted on a video game console with Nintendo, so we consider Solid Snake a Nintendo character, even if the more popular games released in the series were on PlayStation. Hey, Solid Snake is just a ripoff of Snake Plissken from Escape From New York. All the rules have gone out the window. Solid Snake is one of the most famous video game characters of the last 30 or so years. If we could count him, we were going to do it.

Alright, if we didn’t annoy you with the Solid Snake thing, we might be annoying you now. Yes, Yoshi began life in Super Mario World. However, the dinosaur with the lengthy tongue was swiftly spun off into his own video games. There’s Yoshi’s Island, Yoshi’s Cookie, and more. Yoshi is off doing his own thing a lot of the time. He’s less definitively linked to the Mario games. Even Luigi’s game series is all about him looking for Mario. Yoshi is his own entity.