How games changed — or didn't — on their journey to every platform
Street Fighter II's journey from Capcom's CPS-1 arcade hardware to home consoles became a defining moment in the console wars, with each platform's version acting as a benchmark for what the hardware could deliver.
Mortal Kombat's 1993 home ports ignited a national debate over video game violence when the SNES version removed blood and altered fatalities while the Genesis version restored them via a button code, directly leading to the creation of the ESRB rating system.
id Software's Doom became the benchmark for first-person shooter ports throughout the 1990s, with conversions to every major console exposing the wide range of hardware capabilities and developer skill across platforms.
Sonic the Hedgehog's simultaneous 8-bit adaptations for the Game Gear and Master System were entirely new games designed around weaker hardware rather than direct ports, resulting in a distinctly different — and largely underappreciated — branch of Sonic's early history.
Final Fight's SNES port was the system's flagship launch-window title but arrived with one player character removed, two-player co-op absent, and significant content censored, making it a textbook case of the compromises demanded by both hardware limitations and Nintendo's content policies.
Konami's four-player TMNT arcade brawler was one of the most beloved coin-ops of its era, and its home ports — particularly the NES version — demonstrated the significant sacrifices required to bring a wide-screen, four-player arcade experience to single-screen home hardware.
NBA Jam's home ports brought Midway's outlandish two-on-two basketball game to virtually every platform of the mid-1990s, with the 16-bit console versions successfully preserving the game's frenetic energy and hidden character codes that made it a cultural phenomenon.
Sega's Out Run became one of the most widely ported arcade games of the late 1980s, appearing on nearly every home computer and console of the era with results ranging from impressive to barely recognisable.
Pac-Man's 1982 Atari 2600 port is one of the most notorious conversions in gaming history — a rushed, technically compromised release that contributed to the 1983 video game crash by failing to meet the expectations of consumers who paid full price expecting an arcade-quality experience.
Tetris's journey from a Soviet research institute to the world's most-played game was complicated by one of the most contested software licensing disputes in history, ultimately handing Nintendo exclusive handheld rights and making the Game Boy version one of the best-selling games of all time.
The Sega Saturn port of Symphony of the Night, released exclusively in Japan, added significant new content including a second playable character, new areas, and new enemies — making it a collector's curiosity that offered a more complete game than the original PlayStation release.
GoldenEye 007 was one of the most influential first-person shooters ever made and one of the best-selling N64 games, yet it went unported to any other platform for over two decades due to a uniquely complicated web of overlapping intellectual property rights.
The Atari 2600 conversion of Space Invaders is the video game industry's first killer app — a port so desirable that it quadrupled sales of the console it ran on, and in many cases sold the entire system by itself.
Jordan Mechner's rotoscoped platformer began life on the ageing Apple II and was ported to a vast range of platforms across the following decade, its uncannily fluid animation surviving every conversion to redefine how games moved.
DMA Design's puzzle classic sold 55,000 copies on its first day on the Amiga and was subsequently ported to over 30 platforms — an estimated 15 million copies across every machine that could conceivably run it.
Two CD-ROMs of up to 700MB each, squeezed onto a single 64MB Nintendo 64 cartridge — with the full-motion video cutscenes intact. It is widely considered the most improbable port ever completed.
Nintendo's content policy turned id's Nazi-shooting landmark into a game where you fight the "Staatmeister" and his mutant rats, in a country called the Master State, with almost no blood.
Éric Chahi built it essentially alone over two years, in polygons rather than sprites — which is precisely why it ported to almost everything, and why almost every version looks right.