Play Wayne Gretzky Hockey on nes Online

Wayne Gretzky Hockey came out on the Nintendo Entertainment System in 1991, published by Bethesda Softworks. It was one of the later hockey games for the system, arriving after titles like Blades of Steel, and it tried to carve out its own space with a few unique ideas. The presentation is straightforward, with a top-down view of the ice that was common for the era, but it included some features that weren't standard in other NES sports titles.

You control a single player on the ice at a time, switching between them as the puck moves, with the main objective being to outscore your opponent. Two of its signature mechanics are the ability to create and save your own custom teams and a surprisingly involved coaching mode where you can set strategies for each period. The game also includes fighting; after a big check, a fight can break out, resolved through a simple button-mashing mini-game. The pacing is slower and more deliberate than the arcade-style action of its competitors, and the goalie AI is notoriously unreliable, leading to some soft goals. It feels like a thoughtful, if sometimes clunky, attempt to simulate hockey on limited hardware.