The Japanese Family Computer (Famicom) (top) and international Nintendo Entertainment System (bottom).

An NES cartridge (top) is taller than a typical Famicom cartridge.

The Nintendo Entertainment System has a library of 1376^[a] officially licensed games released for the Japanese version, the Family Computer (Famicom), and its international counterpart, the NES, during their lifespans, plus 7 official multicarts and 2 championship cartridges. Of these, 672 were released exclusively in Japan, 187 were released exclusively in North America, and 19 were released exclusively in PAL countries. Worldwide, 521 games were released.

Its launch games for the Famicom were Donkey Kong, Donkey Kong Jr., and Popeye. The launch games for North America were: 10-Yard Fight, Baseball, Clu Clu Land, Duck Hunt, Excitebike, Golf, Gyromite, Hogan's Alley, Ice Climber, Kung Fu, Pinball, Soccer, Stack-Up, Super Mario Bros., Tennis, Wild Gunman, and Wrecking Crew.^[1][2][b] The final licensed game released is the PAL-exclusive The Lion King on May 25, 1995.

As was typical for consoles of its era, the Famicom utilized ROM cartridges as the primary method of game distribution;^[3] measuring 3 inches (7.6 cm) high by 5.3 inches (13 cm) wide, each cartridge featured 60 pins, with two pins reserved for external sound chips.^[4][5] For the console's North American release in 1985 as the Nintendo Entertainment System, Nintendo redesigned the cartridge to accommodate the console's front-loading, videocassette recorder-derived socket by nearly doubling its height and increasing its width by one centimeter (0.39 in).^{[6]: 108 [7]} Referred to as "Game Paks", each NES cartridge sported an increased total of 72 pins, with two pins reserved for the CIC lockout chip and ten pins reserved for connections with the console's bottom expansion port; however, the two pins for external sound were removed and relocated to the expansion port instead.^{[5][6]: 367} Though the extra space of the NES cartridge was not utilized by most games, it enabled the inclusion of additional hardware expansions; in contrast, some copies of early NES games like Gyromite merely paired the printed circuit board of the game's Famicom version with an adapter to convert between the different pinouts.^{[6]: 108 [8]}

Nintendo later released the Famicom Disk System (FDS) in Japan in 1986, intending to have developers distribute all future games on proprietary 2.8-inch (7.1 cm) floppy disks to avoid the cost and size limitations of cartridges; however, developers began re-releasing FDS games on cartridges as advancements in cartridge technology made them feasible again with the limitations of the floppy disks and their ecosystem apparent, pulling support for the FDS by the 1990s.^[5]