On August 23, 1991, the Super Nintendo (SNES) changed video gaming for me significantly.
Prior to that date, video games were a rediscovered love. My teenage years were spent away from gaming, preferring chasing girls to saving princesses. I snapped out of it long enough to catch the tail end of the NES’s North American lifespan. That 8-bit wonder was a marvel.
The 16-bit SNES was a revelation.
In 1990, I owned both an NES and a Sega Genesis. Although I loved the NES, the Genesis was a bit enigmatic for me. Some of the games were awesome – my favorites back then were Strider and Herzog Zwei – but the system just didn’t do it for me. It’s actually hard to explain. The games looked great for the time – Castle of Illusion Starring Mickey Mouse was absolutely beautiful. But there was something about the console that put me off.
It was in 1990 when I started to see screenshots of games for the Super Famicom, the Japanese SNES. They looked gorgeous…but so did the Genesis games out at the time. Granted, the Super Famicom games looked more colorful, but I didn’t see a real advantage.
The marketing for the console threw out advertising buzzwords I didn’t care about at the time. MODE 7! TRUE 16-BIT GRAPHICS! Why should I care about that? Are the games good?
Then August 23, 1991 arrived. The SNES was released in the States.
True story: a week after the SNES released, I had yet to try it out. Truthfully, I was still on the fence about the console. It looked like a contender, but I didn’t want to throw 200 large at the thing without being sure. I mean, I had a Genesis…
I would go to the local Lionel Play World and Toys ‘R Us to give it a spin, but the kiosks were always packed with kids. Fortunately, the video rental store by my house had snagged a few SNES consoles and was renting them. For $20 plus a $50 refundable deposit, I could rent the console for three days. Yes, times were simpler back then.
I rented the console, took it home, pulled it out of its rental case, hooked it up to my TV, and played about fifteen minutes of Super Mario World. I then turned off the console, unplugged it, carefully packed it up into its case, and returned it to the video store. I raced to Lionel Play World, ran towards the electronics department, threw my credit card at the poor schlep behind the counter, and screamed, “GIMME MY SNES RIGHT NOW!!!”
In fifteen minutes, I was completely sold. The SNES was legit. The Sega Genesis? We still talked, but it wasn’t the same.
I spent days playing Super Mario World, then ran out and bought or rented more games when I could. Every game at or near launch floored me: F-Zero, Pilotwings, Actraiser, Super R-Type, Final Fantasy II…OMG Final Fantasy II! It was like a never-ending cavalcade of awesome!
It was when I started playing on the SNES that I realized what it was about the Genesis that put me off.
It wasn’t the visuals. Sure, the SNES games looked more vibrant because of its larger color palette (256 on-screen colors from a palette of 32,768 vs 61 out of a palette of 512), but had a slightly blockier look (256×224 base resolution vs the Genesis’ 320×224). It wasn’t the console’s brains, either. The SNES’s Ricoh 5A22 CPU maxed out at 3.58MHz, a far cry from the Genesis’ Motorola 68000, which ran at a blistering (at the time) 7.6 MHz.
It was the SNES’s sound that totally crushed the Genesis!
Sega outfitted the Genesis with a Yamaha YM2612 FM synthesizer and a Texas Instruments SN76489 Programmable Sound Generator (PSG). In the right hands, the sounds produced by the combo were very powerful. The Streets of Rage series and Thunder Force IV are testaments to what Sega’s box could do when utilized properly. But many times, Genesis games sounded tinny. It was that tinny sound that plagued my time with the console. I’m not a sound snob by any stretch of the imagination, but the Genesis often sounded to me like a harpsichord with pneumonia.
The SNES’s sound chip was the legendary S-SMP. It consisted of a Sony SPC700 and S-DSP. The SPC700 was a bog-standard 8-bit chip based on ancient Motorola 6502 tech. The S-DSP (Digital Signal Processor) was the console’s real “secret sauce.” It was able to produce 8 simultaneous voices in full 16-bit stereo. The two chips combined produced some of the best chiptune soundtracks ever created.
The SNES was not without its flaws, but its positives somehow won out. A perfect example of this in my eyes is Irem’s Super R-Type. The near-launch title is a side-scrolling shoot-em-up set in a series that built its legacy on fast twitch gameplay. The SNES version, however, couldn’t hold up. Its puny CPU chugged hard when trying to render scenes, and there were frequent slowdowns during gameplay, a big no-no in shoot-em-ups. But dat soundtrack tho! The Stage 1 tune is forever stuck in my head!
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The SNES’s aural prowess didn’t automatically make it better in my eyes. Gameplay rules when playing games. But an awesome soundtrack complements visuals and gameplay. The best example around the SNES’s launch is Enix’s Actraiser. (Yes, Enix. Not Square Enix. They were two separate companies once upon a time.) This awesome action-sim hybrid was great from a gameplay standpoint, but…I mean, look at this clip – another Stage 1 clip – and tell me this isn’t AWESOME!
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In the end, the Super Nintendo was a nearly perfect console in my eyes. I still played my Genesis, and managed to snag a TurboGrafx-16 afterward, which I also loved. Trust me, there was no console war in my home. But some of the greatest video gaming memories I have involve Nintendo’s 16-bit wunderkind.
My most loved memory: after my accident in 1995, I spent a lot of time in bed. Naturally, I played video games to pass the time. I managed to purchase a PlayStation and played the hell out of Ridge Racer while recovering, but I always went back to my SNES. My go-to game at the time was NHL Stanley Cup, an average game with a gimmick: tons of Mode 7 hardware scaling to give the impression of being in the rink. For some reason, I just loved playing the game.
My son was one year old at the time of my accident. While I recovered, he would stop by the bed and see what I was doing. He’d often catch me playing NHL Stanley Cup. He had no interest in the game…but he fell in love with the intro.
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There is nothing special about that intro. He thought otherwise. He would watch the intro in rapt attention, whining the moment the title screen came up so that I could reset the console. He would spend upwards of 5 minutes wanting to see the intro, before he lost interest and decided to saunter off and smash some of his toys together.
For that and for dozens of other reasons, the Super Nintendo is my favorite video game console of all time. It’s not a subjective decree, it is purely emotional.
Happy 25th birthday, SNES. In remembrance of this event, I shall light you up once again and play some Super Mario Kart.
