Yesterday marked the two-year anniversary for Take On The NES Library!

The year 2017 has been a lean year for the website, and a large portion of that has to do with this being a fantastic year to be a modern Nintendo fan. As you know, the Nintendo Switch released this year, and I got my console and The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild on launch day. I will always make some time to play through some good first-party Nintendo games, but the combination of a new Zelda game and a new console that I can play anywhere has really given me the freedom to dedicate much more time to brand new games. It’s so much simpler to play the Switch upstairs in bed instead of playing on my TV. And my wife is happier that I’m spending more time with her versus playing alone in the basement. So far I have put over 150 hours into Breath of the Wild and I’m still not finished, and now almost all my attention has gone toward Super Mario Odyssey. Nintendo has absolutely killed it this year and I feel confident that this year will be remembered as one of Nintendo’s best years ever, perhaps even their strongest year.

So all that is to say that it has been a slow year in terms of progress on my project. I did have a strong end of 2016 with several games completed. Then in January I started grinding through the long season of Bases Loaded. That completion took up the first two months of the year. The end of Bases Loaded dovetailed straight into the Switch release. I still managed to beat a game every couple of weeks or so after that, up until October anyway. With the release of Super Mario Odyssey and some other commitments, I put the project on break for about a month. I’m now ramping back up into normal progress again. Rest assured, I am ready to get back to business and clear some more NES games!

On last year’s anniversary post, I ran some numbers to see how the project was progressing over the long haul. I’ve decided to do that again and make this a yearly tradition. This is going to read like some kind of corporate financial statement or something, but maybe you will find this interesting. Over two years, I have beaten 62 NES games. This averages out to a completion every 11.8 days, which is worse than the 9.6 days per completion from last year’s update. On the current pace, the project should take 7,888 days to complete from start to finish with an estimated end date of June 28, 2037. My slow pace this year added almost four years to that estimate. I have to believe that I will pick up the pace within the next year, and that the 24 games finished this year will be near the lowest output in any year for the life of this project.

Thank you very much for reading this and following along on this journey over the past two years. You have helped give this project life, and I hope that I will cover more games that you will look forward to reading!