Playing With Super Power: Inside The SNES

30 YEARS SINCE IT HIT JAPAN, MANY PLAYERS STILL FEEL THAT THE SUPER NINTENDO IS THE BEST CONSOLE EVER MADE. WE SPEAK TO VETERAN SNES DEVELOPERS TO FIND OUT HOW THE GAMES THAT MADE THIS GREY BOX LEGENDARY WERE SHAPED BY WHAT WAS INSIDE OF IT

Nintendo luminaries reveal what it was like tinkering with the powerful hardware of the legendary 16-bit console

Videogames hardware production is a fascinating business, and one that has a couple of odd, counterintuitive quirks. The first one is that technological superiority is usually more harmful than it is helpful – if power drove sales, we’d still be talking about the dominance of the Atari Lynx and Xbox. The second is that success is hard to sustain for two generations in a row. All too often, companies have followed up their most popular systems with machines that range from underwhelming to total bombs, such as the Atari 5200, Saturn and Xbox

One. As the longest tenured hardware manufacturer in the business, Nintendo has hardly been immune from these truths, with the Nintendo 64 and Wii U serving as ample proof. But it has produced the only machine we can think of that served as an exception to both of those statements at the same time – the Super Nintendo Entertainment System, or Super Famicom as it’s known in Japan. But as readers will know, it’s far more than just a historical anomaly, and is one of the most highly regarded platforms in the history of videogames, and much of its success can be attributed to Nintendo’s hardware design prowess.