Kung Fu

An unhealthy amount of Kung Fu was played.  I first saw this in an arcade, but this is an NES game to me.  Drawing heavily from the plot of a movie where Bruce Lee fights Kareem Abdul-Jabbar Kung Fu delivered a challenging but approachable gameplay experience.  Your character climbs the levels of a tower as the difficulty ramps up and new enemy types are introduced.  This formula has been done to death a million times since Kung Fu, but it still felt fresh at the time that it came out.  Also having endured the graphics of the 2600 the NES really delivered in terms of both graphics and control.