Seven years passed between the release of Ridley Scott's "Alien" in 1979 and the arrival of James Cameron's action-heavy follow-up "Aliens" in 1986. In that time, while a new generation of science-fiction films were capturing the imaginations of moviegoers, another major media shift was happening at home in the world of video games. Nintendo released the Famicom in Japan, and by '86, it had made its way to the U.S., revolutionizing the home gaming market with a series of highly influential titles.

You know the names: "Super Mario Bros.," "The Legend of Zelda," and just slightly lower on the hierarchy of fame, a game called "Metroid," which spawned its own massively popular franchise that's still going strong to this day. Where most of Nintendo's other big first-party games took place in

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