30 years ago today, on August 23, 1991, the first Super Nintendo consoles started appearing in the wild in North America. This was Nintendo's bold 16-bit debut, and even today, few consoles can boast such an incredible, timeless line-up of stone-cold classics. Most Americans got their shiny new SNES on its official nationwide launch date of September 9. But for the lucky few who managed to snag one early, that week in August must have been pretty special.
The SNES was a technical marvel. With its Mode 7 technology, developers were able to bend, rotate, and twist pixels to create the illusion of three dimensions: something the rival Sega Genesis could only dream of. This was used to great effect in racing games like Mario Kart and F-Zero, flight sim Pilotwings, and a mind-bending rotating level in Super Castlevania 4.
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Some genius SNES developers even found ways to include additional graphics hardware in the game cartridges themselves, massively expanding the possibilities of the console. The most famous example of this was the Super FX chip, which made 3D games like Star Fox possible. Primitive by modern standards, but absolutely mind-blowing at the time.
The SNES had every other console beat when it came to image quality too. The Genesis had a palette of 512 colours and could display 62 on the screen at any one time. Now compare that to the SNES, which had a palette of 32,000 colours and was able to display 256 at a time. That's why SNES games sizzle with vibrant colours, and most Genesis games look dark and murky in comparison. Sega's console is great; but the SNES was in a whole other league.
And don't forget the controller. With eight buttons, there was no better home console to play Street Fighter on. And not only that, but the SNES was the first console to throw shoulder buttons into the mix—a design innovation that has since become an industry standard. Look at a modern Xbox or PlayStation pad and the DNA of the Super Nintendo is right there.
The SNES was unbeatable when it came to technology—but it had the games to back it up too. This was a console absolutely heaving with incredible RPGs. We're talking Final Fantasy 6, EarthBound, Chrono Trigger, Star Ocean, Secret of Mana… the list goes on. It had a killer version of Street Fighter 2, genre-defining platformers like Super Metroid and Donkey Kong Country, a bunch of great Mega Man games, and even the best Zelda, A Link to the Past.
It's wild how many all-time classics a single console generated. But hey, that's the SNES for you: an absolute overachiever of a console. And it's worth noting that the console wasn't just great for the time—it still is. The games above are still worth playing today, and still look amazing. 30 might as well be 400 in video game years, and yet the Super Nintendo can still hold its own with the best of them. Has there ever been a better console? I doubt it.
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