A Nightmare on Elm Street is a video game released on the Nintendo Entertainment System in 1990 based on Wes Craven's slasher film of the same name.

[2] The objective is to scour the vicinity of Elm Street, collect the bones of the supernatural serial killer Freddy Krueger and dispose of them in the local high school's furnace.

[8] Collecting certain icons grants the player characters special powers while they're within the Dream World, namely the ability to throw shurikens, javelins or magic projectiles.

In the original game concept, the players would control Freddy Krueger and should kill the teenagers who were attempting to gather his scattered bones in order to rebury them.

Years earlier, a video game adaptation of the movie The Texas Chain Saw Massacre had been released for the Atari 2600, where the player controls the murderer with the objective to chase and kill victims.

Chris Bieniek of VideoGames & Computer Entertainment called A Nightmare on Elm Street unusually good for a film-based game, praising its "smooth, quick, and responsive" controls, and strong presentation, highlighting the "movielike wavering of the screen" that occurs when entering the dream world.

[13][15][20] The Video Game Critic claimed that although A Nightmare on Elm Street was "standard platform fare", it was made somewhat engaging by an atmosphere that reflected the movies and a sleep meter aspect that the publication positively compared to the material-and-spectral-realm system of Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver (1999).

[20] Writing in retrospect in 2010, an IGN journalist was mixed towards the game, praising its sleep meter element but also feeling it was a "low-rent Castlevania with a great but bizarrely weak super-villain.