First NES game with parallax scrolling

I'm trying to find out which NES game was the first to use parallax scrolling.

Technically, a status bar is already parallax scrolling in a way: You have one part of the screen that scrolls at n pixels per frame and one part that simply scrolls at 0 pixels per frame.

But of course I'm talking about parallax scrolling in the intended way: Where two background layers scroll at different speeds.
So, "Kung Fu" doesn't count either since there it's just a trick to move the player sprite which really consists of background tiles, but the effect is not used to simulate the visual effect of different background layers here.

The oldest game that I could find was "Formation Z".
Interestingly, the output screws up when setting the emulator to PAL. I thought that they used sprite 0 for the parallax since the game's status bar only consists of sprites. But it looks like they used timed code.

Is there any NES/Famicom game that's older than "Formation Z" that uses parallax scrolling somewhere?

Excitebike has a parallax split for the grandstands in the background.

F-1 Race has a parallaxing background and road, and might predate Excitebike by a few months.

Exerion comes slightly after Excitebike and it has a very strange / interesting attempt at 3D representation, I think technically the sprites are doing a parallax thing against the background, but it's a bit unusual.

I had a look.
Am I seeing this right? The audience scrolls in the same way as the track, but the fence scrolls at a different speed? Also, the fence scrolls faster than the track, i.e. totally backwards from what you would usually expect.

How did they manage to pull off three splits (audience/fence, fence/track, track/status bar) in a mapper 0 game without screwing up when setting the NTSC game to PAL?

Yeah the scrolling speeds in Excitebike are pretty backwards-looking.

Another early game that comes to mind is F1 Race, according to bootgod's DB it seems to have been released the same month as Excitebike.

Sorry to be boring, but if you sort Famicom releases by date, Devil World is arguably the first FC game with parallax: a centre board that moves at different speeds from top & bottom monster platforms, with two columns that overlap the entirety of the central board.

The fences that border the track pan at the same speed/direction (left) as the track (i.e. the fences are not unique). The best time board/Nintendo logo/audience, however, "pan" left at a different speed. This is what makes it "parallax" (visually). I do not want to get into a discussion about "if it looks visually weird/awkward/backwards".

I need rainwarrior or someone else to confirm my suspicions -- very likely I have this wrong -- but I'm going off of a bit of REing in FCEUX and NO$NES:

The Nintendo logo/best time board/audience (scanlines 0 to ~55, or PPU RAM $2000 to $20FF) "pans" at a different speed than what's below it (grass/fences/track).

From what I can guess, the "split" of the Nintendo logo/best time board/audience region vs. the lower part of the screen is done purely with timing (probably some CPU loops that wait N cycles). Some emulators (NO$NES) will even show a minor graphical anomaly directly below the best time board -- a glitchy white horizontal line/bar that comes and goes -- so someone's probably tweaking $2000/2005/2006 after the Nintendo logo/best time board/audience (or somewhere very close to there) so that the rest of the grass/fences/track is shifted or panned left slightly faster.

Sprite 0 (a black/empty tile) is placed on the far right of the screen (PPU RAM $231F), in the first row of "black" that makes up the status bar -- common technique there, no biggie.

As for NTSC vs. PAL, I have a gut feeling that this could explain for several scanlines of "empty blue space" beneath the best time/Nintendo logo and a huge bunch of space (grass), scanline-wise, after that. Maybe it's enough room for the timing difference to not make an actual visual difference? Hard to explain in words what I'm referring to here.

Not boring at all (I had forgotten about Devil World :D So sad we didn't get this one in North America). I wouldn't classify this as "parallax scrolling" -- I would classify this as giving the effect of multiple background layers. I don't wanna nitpick, but DRW did explicitly state scrolling, i.e. there has to be two backgrounds/playfields *moving* at different rates -- in Devil World there's only actually one that's moving.

As for how the "layers" effect is accomplished: the 2 columns are made up entirely of sprites: 10 separate sprites make up the left column (placed one after another vertically), and 10 others make up the right. All the sprites use one of 6 tiles that make up the "barbershop pole" animation. There aren't many sprites on-screen so you generally won't encounter the 8-per-scanline limit + see sprite flicker. There are cases where the monsters can go outside or "over" the columns, in which case the "column" sprite for that spot points to the monster tile(s) for the duration of the monster's presence at that location.

First-gen Famicom/NES games are actually cool/clever in the sense that their end visual results often resemble something that you might find in an arcade title (Devil World is a great example, same with Clu Clu Land).

I just opened this list of Famicom games on Wikipedia and sorted by date, and listed any that I could remember parallax/layers from.


Good suggestion. I'd forgotten about Devil World's strange "frame" layer.

Looking back at Galaxian I was surprised that it didn't move the stars at different rates, though you still might consider it to have two layers (the stars below the playfield). A few months later Galaga had a similar setup but did have parallax between the stars.