Super Nintendo Entertainment System (thing)

The Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES) was Nintendo's second game console, released to replace the aging Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) in 1991. Unlike its predecessor, the Super Nintendo had serious competition for most of its lifetime in the form of the Sega Genesis (or Sega Mega Drive). This situation became known as the 'console wars', polarizing gamers for its duration.

Origins

In 1987, Nintendo had most everything they wanted. The NES owned the North American video game market, and the Famicom similarly ruled the Japanese market. Technology, however, would not allow Nintendo to become complacent. The first credible challenger to their Japanese domination was NEC's PC Engine, released that year, sporting a greatly improved '16-bit' graphics chip and a fast (8-bit) 6502 processor. Though not a true 16-bit system, its vivid colour and improved resolution were a marked improvement over the aging NES. Despite its success in Japan, though, the PC Engine flopped in North America when released as the creatively-spelled TurboGrafx 16, and was barely released in Europe.

In 1988, Sega released the follow-up to their moderately successful Master System, the Mega Drive. Unlike the 8-bit, 6502 driven NES and PC Engine, the Mega Drive was based on the legendary Motorola 68000 processor, heart of the the earliest Sun workstations, of the original Macintosh, the Amiga, and the Atari ST. Coupled with a Z80 sound/IO coprocessor, this lent the Mega Drive the computational power for detailed and fast graphics. Despite this, the Mega Drive made few inroads against the Famicom and PC Engine, but the writing was on the wall for Nintendo's first generation hardware.

While Sega was introducing the Mega Drive (renamed as the Sega Genesis due to trademark issues) to the North American market to great success in 1989, Nintendo was developing their response, which would become the Super Famicom. Like Apple in their advancement of the Apple II line to the IIgs, Nintendo chose to follow the 6502-derived processor of the NES with a version of the 65816 processor, the 5A22. This 16-bit processor was augmented with a 16-bit video chip supporting 128 sprites up to 64x64 in size, three background layers for parallax scrolling, and the impressive pseudo-3D Mode 7. The new system also included a powerful custom sound chip, the SPC-700, which brought wavetable synthesis to game consoles to dramatic effect.

Release

With the 1990 release of the Super Famicom, Nintendo turned to combat the rapidly growing Sega Genesis in North America. Nintendo Power magazine and other Nintendo outlets relentlessly hyped the new system in the year preceding its North American release. Sega, meanwhile, was steadily growing in market share, and in 1991 they pulled an ace out of their sleeve.

Unlike Nintendo, who had a recognizable flagship mascot, Mario, whose games sold like wildfire and were synonymous with Nintendo quality, Sega had no comparable series. The Alex Kidd games were Sega's unofficial mascot series, but they never really caught on. (The poor quality of the titles probably contributed...) With the 1991 release of Sonic the Hedgehog, this all changed. Suddenly Sega had their own star, and one that made Nintendo's star look staid and conventional. Powered by the fast Genesis hardware, Sonic brought a new style of gaming to the platform genre, one based on pure, blazing speed.

Finally, in August 1991, Nintendo unleashed their new system to the primed-and-ready North American market. Released along with the system were three games designed to show off the capabilities of the new hardware: Super Mario World, F-Zero, and Pilotwings. Super Mario World was bundled with the system; it refined the free-roaming, non-linear platform world of Super Mario Brothers 3, using the new controller's additional capbilities to add to Mario's moves, and introducing Yoshi the dinosaur. The smooth, colourful graphics clearly represented an advance from the NES, and the soundtrack showed off the dynamic synthesis capabilities of the system by including a drum track only when Mario is riding Yoshi.

Both F-Zero and Pilotwings showed off the capabilities of Mode 7; the former using it to produce a zippy arcade racer, and the latter faking 3D graphics in a flight simulator. Pilotwings also showed off a capability of the SNES that would be a great advantage to Nintendo later in its lifetime; the capability to put custom processing chips into cartridges. The DSP chip in the Pilotwings cartridge was originally intended to be integrated into the system, but cost considerations moved it out into cartridges. Also available on launch was Nintendo's delightful port of SimCity.

A criticism of the SNES on launch was its lack of backward compatibility. The hardware similarities between the two systems had led people to expect NES compatibility, and the Genesis had compatibility with Master System games through an adapter. Also, once again, the North American SNES was compatible with the Japanese Super Famicom outside of physical incompatibilities in cartridge shape. Unlike with the NES, though, the two systems were electrically compatible, giving pass-through accessories like the Game Genie the added capability of international compatibility.

Battle

The following two years were the core of the 16-bit console wars. This was not just a platform vs. platform competition, like the recent Playstation 2/Xbox/GameCube console wars, but also a number of franchise vs. franchise wars. In 1991, Super Mario World battled with Sonic the Hedgehog, and Final Fantasy II battled with Phantasy Star III. Many developers had exclusivity agreements with one company or the other, and of course first-party games were always exclusive. Nintendo and their collaborators mined the NES legacy with "Super" editions of the older games: Super Castlevania, Super Ghouls 'n Ghosts, and Super R-Type were the first.

The floodgates opened up in 1992. Sega's agressive and agressively anti-Nintendo marketing campaign, combined with the blockbuster release of Sonic the Hedgehog 2 led the Genesis to outsell the SNES and Sega to capture 55% of the market. Nintendo countered with a number of classic follow-ups to classic games, beginning with The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, and included Super Mario Kart kicking off the mascot kart racing genre. Sega released the Sega CD that fall to considerable (though mostly hype-driven) sales, and it seemed that Sega could do no wrong by the North American market.

Sega marketed themselves to a more 'mature' audience than Nintendo did (although 'mature' here seems to refer to 14 year old boys...), with more arcade games and sports games, as well as relaxed content policies next to Nintendo's strict 'family-friendly' policies. This policy cut both ways, of course, but it became a flashpoint upon the release of Mortal Kombat in 1993. The Genesis version carried the bloody violence of the arcade original intact, whereas the SNES version was censored. The Genesis version accordingly outsold the SNES version four to one. This event significantly affected policy at both companies. The political controversy over the game caused Sega to found one of the first video game ratings bodies, while Nintendo relaxed their censorship policies somewhat, allowing, for example, the SNES version of Mortal Kombat 2 to be released uncensored.

Not that Nintendo and company were otherwise idle in 1993, however. The Mega Man series finally entered the 16-bit era with Mega Man X. Squaresoft's classic action RPG Secret of Mana was released that year, and Nintendo's own StarFox introduced the SuperFX chip allowing for (crude) 3D polygonal graphics. Nintendo's tradition of enhanced remakes began with the release of Super Mario All-Stars, which would later be bundled on a single cart with Super Mario World.

Triumph

The Super Nintendo's final ascendance over the Genesis in 1994-5 was due in equal parts to Nintendo's successful leveraging of the SNES's strengths and to Sega's blunders concerning Genesis add-ons. While Sega released a number of quality games for the Sega CD, including Sonic CD and the two Lunar games, it remained that the Sega CD's catalogue was a morass of gimmicks and soporific 'FMV games' that caused the intial rash of sales to cool quickly and stay low. This would cause Nintendo to call off their own plans for a CD add-on, to be developed in conjunction with Sony.

Nintendo's 1994 releases continued to increase their use of the SNES's capabilities. The large cartridge capacities possible with the SNES led to the release of Donkey Kong Country, with its impressive, fluid pre-rendered 3D graphics, as well as the massive Super Metroid. The flagship RPG series would battle again, as Final Fantasy III and Sega's Phantasy Star IV were both released that year. Sega brought their platformers to a new level with the split game Sonic the Hedgehog 3/Sonic and Knuckles. Nevertheless, Sega would close out 1994 with their biggest blunder of the Genesis era: the 32X

The 32X was concieved as a half-step to a new generation console that would be cheaper than an all-out new system. Released in time for Christmas 1994, it quickly became apparent that the accessory was rushed to market, perhaps to take advantage of the rapidly closing window before the release of the Sega Saturn. (The Japanese 32X was actually released after the Japanese Saturn.) Not only was the system understocked at launch (there were several times as many preorders as launch 32Xs), but there were widespread reports of malfunctions and mechanical failures, and the game library was rushed and substandard.

The final nail on the Genesis's coffin was the mid-1995 release of the Sega Saturn, pushed ahead to compete with Sony's PlayStation launch. Sega tried to maintain both the Saturn and the 32X in an ill-concieved attempt at market segmentation, but to developers the Saturn was the future of Sega and they succeeded in killing the 32X. Meanwhile, Nintendo was releasing more and more advanced games for the vanilla SNES, including the SuperFX-powered Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island, Square's gorgeous time-travel RPG Chrono Trigger, and an improved Donkey Kong Country 2.

Decline

Towards the end of 1995, though the SNES had succeeded in defeating the Genesis, the writing was once again on the wall. A new generation of systems had begun, with the newcomer Sony Playstation, based off of technology developed for the ill-fated SNES CD-ROM, enjoying ever-greater sales, and the Sega Saturn making inroads in Japan. Not to mention, of course, Nintendo's own "Project Reality", soon to become the "Ultra 64" and then the Nintendo 64. Nevertheless, a final generation of SNES games was released that used the capacities of the system to the limit was released. The SA-1 chip provided powerful processing support to Super Mario RPG and Kirby Super Star, while the S-DD1 chip allowed Street Fighter Alpha 2 and the Japan-only Star Ocean to push the capacity of SNES cartridges for high-resolution graphics.

The Nintendo 64 was released in North America in September 1996, and accordingly the SNES went into maintenance mode. A few new games were released in 1997, including the cult classic Harvest Moon, along with a redesigned version of the system that was smaller and cheaper, similar to the NES II. This version of the SNES would continue to be produced until 1999, but no new games would be released for it. The time of 2D home consoles was over.

Now

The Super Nintendo has gathered one of the largest emulation communities in the console emulation world. Unlike most other consoles, which have seen a succession of different emulators since the beginning of practical console emulation in the mid-1990s, SNES emulation has been dominated by two programs: the portable, slower Snes9x, and the x86-only fast ZSNES. Both of these emulators are open source, which helps to ensure that they include the latest emulation features, rather than being supplanted by new programs incorporating these features.

The success of SNES emulation has led to a considerale interest in SNES game fan translation. Final Fantasy V was famously translated back in 1997, and Seiken Densetsu 3 not much later. A plethora of other games have been translated into English from their original Japanese, the translators spurred on by the lack of an official localized version. Most of these games are RPGs, from the aforementioned pair to games like Bahamut Lagoon and Star Ocean, but other games have been translated, such as the gorgeous 1998-released Mega Man game Rockman and Forte.

These activities are too large for Nintendo to ignore; for the first few years of SNES emulation they fought considerable legal battles against emulation, and although they received a ruling that the emulators themselves were legal, the distribution of copyrighted ROM files remains illegal. Perhaps inspired by the success of the iTunes Music Store, Nintendo announced that their upcoming next-generation console, Project Revolution, will not only feature backwards-compatibility with the GameCube but also with the NES, SNES, and Nintendo 64, something that can only be achieved through emulation. If gamers' hopes on this are true, then the little grey box may be reborn onto television sets around the world soon enough.