Back to the Future for the NES was the second game I ever owned, after the Super Mario Bros./Duck Hunt cartridge that came with the system. My friend’s older brother, Carl, told me it was awesome, so I asked for it for my birthday.

I don’t know if Carl actually believed that or if he was deliberately feeding bad info to a gullible ten year old. Either way, Back To The Future was definitely not a good game. It was what I had, though, so I played the heck out of it.

Most of the game happens from a top-down perspective, with Marty McFly powerwalking along a street to get to his appointment with the DeLorean. A fading photograph of you and your siblings counts down the time limit. That’s about as close as the game gets to the movie.

Most of what you’ll be doing is picking up little alarm clocks which regenerate the fading photograph. You have to dodge guys carrying glass panes, hula-hoop girls throwing marbles (?) and giant bees (??). You don’t actually get to fight back against these menaces unless you pick up a bowling ball, which lets you shoot back.

(The bowling ball is also not thematically appropriate, but I didn’t know that. I had to hide my eyes for most of the scary parts of movies, and I was a serious scaredy-cat, so I’d seen maybe one third of the movie total.)

Keep the bowling ball long enough and you’ll pick up a more appropriate skateboard that lets you zip along and beat the clock. It’s a testament to how much I played this game that I learned to actually use the skateboard for anything other than crashing into obstacles, because that’s pretty much all you’ll be doing unless you memorize the levels. Which I did.

I got past all the walking stages, the mini stages where you have to throw milkshakes at bullies and catch musical notes with the base of your guitar, and started making it to the last level where you have to drive the DeLorean.

The DeLorean stage is one of the few parts of the Back To The Future game that survives in modern game design. All the previous game mechanics get tossed out the window for the final event in favor a punishing pass/fail test. In this case, you have to get the DeLorean up to 88 miles per hour just as you cross the finish line, or you lose, period.

Unlike modern games, there’s no save or checkpoint system in Back To The Future, so my ten-year old self never actually beat the last stage. Forget MMOs, old NES games were a more brutal timesink than anything in World of Warcraft.

How about you? Do you have any fond memories of games that are objectively awful?

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