Beyond Bits and Pixels: Inside the Technology

Ex-Centric Architecture

When designing the console, Masayuki Uemura had decided to forego the strategy of putting a strong heart in the middle of the system, which would translate to a state-of-the-art new chip or core, an expensive one that ran counter to the “lateral thinking with seasoned technology” ethos. Instead, the Super Famicom (SFC) would pursue even further another kind of architecture that had been chosen with the Famicom: a decentralized, networked mode of operation, with specialized components dedicated to specific aspects of the process—like specialized silverware, with different spoons for coffee, tea, soup, and dessert. In doing so, the Super Famicom’s technological architecture closely mirrored Nintendo’s networked organizational structure, as we’ll see in chapter 7.

The Super Famicom is made of a central processing unit (CPU), the brain of the system that is in charge of everything. It sends and receives data by storing and retrieving it in 128 KB of random access memory (Work RAM) using address and data buses that are responsible for directing traffic to the right places, and transporting the data itself. This basic infrastructure links the CPU with a second subsystem: the picture processing unit (PPU) dedicated to the game’s graphical output. The PPU subsystem actually houses two units: the PPU1 and PPU2. In this we can see an extension of Nintendo’s original idea of having a dedicated PPU in the Famicom and of betting on graphics quality. For audio, Nintendo used the 8-bit SPC700 chip, developed by Sony’s Ken Kutaragi, and integrated it as the key part of an audio processing unit (APU) that is, physically and logically, highly independent from the rest of the console, contrary to the Famicom’s 2A03 chip (Altice 2015, chapter 7). The APU boots by itself and waits for the main CPU’s custom sound program (and samples); the code is then executed, and eight channels of digital audio are processed and converted to analog before leaving the APU for output. This technical arrangement maps strangely well onto the exclusionary principle at the heart of the Nintendo Economic System and the “walled garden” model, as seen in chapter 1: Sony’s chip, although located inside the console, is still allowed in through a gated access, inside but outside.

The last sign of the SFC’s decentralized architecture can be found in the cartridge connector; it provides direct access to one of the PPUs and to the APU, which means cartridges can transfer audiovisual data directly without maneuvering through the CPU and thus play an increased role in shaping the game experience. Once again, this design decision is a refinement of a previous arrangement that had made the Famicom’s fortunes: the principle of having cheap baseline hardware open to future expansions, thanks to the possibility of having additional chips added to individual cartridges following their needs. The idea had proved its potential in Japan, with the multi-memory controller (MMC) expansion chips found in many Famicom cartridges. The Super Famicom would repeat this strategy, and as we’ll see in chapter 6, expansion chips in cartridges would greatly expand the console’s life and reach in its later years.

The Wafer-Thin Edge of CPU and Memory

We have seen in chapter 2 how the console was conceived in a rush and how people at Nintendo and in the press in general perceived it as an extension to the Famicom, or a Famicom 2. The CPU provides the clearest illustration of this, as it was a modest upgrade over the Famicom, to say the least. Initial plans for the SFC revolved around a Motorola 68000 processor—the same used in Sega’s Mega Drive/Genesis—but the cost-cutting imperative led to its replacement with something else. Hoping to achieve backward compatibility with the Famicom, Nintendo settled on a custom Ricoh 5A22 processor—a second-source manufacturing of the 65816 processor by Western Design Center—that could emulate the operation of the earlier 6502 (of which the Ricoh 2A03, in the Famicom, was a derivative). Unfortunately, supporting the emulation for the Famicom would prove too costly to get the SFC on the market cheaply, so the backward compatibility plan was axed. The true origin story of the Super Famicom/NES nevertheless remains carved in the silicon of its core: When the Super Famicom is powered on, the processor starts in 6502 emulation mode until a two-instruction sequence shifts it to “native mode” and unlocks its full 16-bit potential (Eyes and Lichty 1992, 44).

In a sense, the 65816 was powerful because it was an upgraded 16-bit microprocessor to the previous 8-bit 6502. The 6502 core had been used and upgraded by Hudson Soft into the HuC6280, which was powering the PC-Engine that had frightened Nintendo. This meant the Super Famicom’s CPU was clearly more advanced than at least one competitor. Sega’s Mega Drive was another matter entirely, however, because it was powered by the costly Motorola 68000 processor and a secondary Zilog Z80 processor (incidentally, a contributing factor to why Sega never got to dive in a pool of gold like Nintendo, as we’ve seen earlier in chapter 2). The 68000 and Z80 had been used extensively in arcade games for years. In fact, Sega had more or less ported its System 16 arcade platform for the home with the Sega Mega Drive, whose processors were clocked at 7.6 MHz and 3.58 MHz. Could the Super Famicom best this rival?

The SFC’s master clock operated at approximately 21.477 MHz, which looked good for Nintendo on paper—and the firm used that in every side-by-side technical comparison it could publish (or get independent magazines to publish). Nintendo was taking the “bit wars” one step further to claim superiority over another 16-bit competitor with the “megahertz myth”—the valuing of clock speed (measured in megahertz) as the principal indicator of a computer system’s performance—like Intel in its war against Apple (Smith 2002). However, the platform’s theoretical processing speed was limited by the architecture and configuration of memory at the heart of the system, which demonstrates the complex and sometimes futile nature of evaluating and comparing competing game consoles, as Brian Benchoff remarks:

The traditional comparison between two consoles is usually presented as a series of specs, a bunch of numbers, and tick marks indicating which system wins in each category. While this does illustrate the strengths and weaknesses of each console, it is a rhetorical technique that is grossly imprecise, given the different architectures. […] Even the Internet’s best console experts fall victim to the trap of comparing specs between different architectures, and it’s complete and utter baloney. (Benchoff 2015)

Without delving into technical minutiae and in-depth comparisons of the performance between the SNES and Genesis (which various Internet message boards and wikis can offer),² I will identify some of the important architectural features of the SFC and how they express Nintendo’s key positions and strategies exposed earlier.

The SFC’s roughly 21 MHz master clock means the crystal oscillator vibrates at a frequency of roughly 21 million cycles per second. Contrary to what the “megahertz myth” entertains, the frequency of the crystal oscillator does not automatically translate into faster or more powerful processing power. Each computing instruction handled by the CPU requires a certain number of CPU clock cycles to perform; on the SNES, each CPU cycle in turn required either 6, 8 or 12 master clock cycles to complete, depending on the destination to be accessed. In other words, the master clock’s job was not to process instructions as fast as it could, but to keep every destination synchronized by adjusting the variable speed of the system bus, the interface that accessed and transported data across the system’s components (namely the central, picture and audio processing units, the hardware registers, the working random access memory or RAM, and the cartridge read-only memory or ROM data itself). Thus, the bus operated at one of three possible speeds: 1.79 MHz, 2.68 MHz, or 3.58 MHz, obtained by dividing the master clock’s 21.477 MHz by 12, 8 and 6, respectively. This determines a range of effective operating speed for the SNES from 1.79 to 3.58 MHz – a far cry from the listed master clock speed of 21.477 MHz that shows how meaningless it stands as a performance metric. In fact, the Super Famicom’s master clock speed of 21.477 MHz was the same as that found in its 8-bit predecessor, the Famicom, whose CPU likewise ran at 1.79 MHz by dividing the master clock cycles by 12. The SFC’s slowest 1.79 MHz speed was used to access the controller port for player input. The middle 2.68 MHz (or “slow”) speed regulated most operations requiring RAM and ROM, typically when handling game data from the cartridge and doing most internal system work. Finally, the highest 3.58 MHz speed governed internal hardware registers that dealt with video output to process graphics and sound, as well as cartridges that used faster (but costlier) memory known as “FastROM”, opposed to the regular 2.68MHz “SlowROM”.

The other main factor limiting the platform’s raw operational speed was the architecture of the buses. The SFC featured two address buses responsible for directing the data traffic to the right memory locations: “bus A” (or the “main bus”) was 24 bits wide and handled data transfers between the CPU, cartridge ROM, and console RAM; “bus B” was 8 bits wide and had the specialized function of handling hardware registers for the PPU and APU, responsible for the player’s audiovisual experience. The address buses were establishing lines of communication between the devices, but the data transport itself was effectuated in a single data bus that was only 8 bits wide, meaning that complex data had to be broken down into multiple, smaller parts and transported in succession, over multiple cycles. This represented an important speed bottleneck, but the settling on an 8-bit data bus appears natural in the context of the console’s development as a successor to the Famicom that was to be backward compatible with the 6502 processor’s 8-bit data bus.

In the end, the SFC’s architecture relied on an unusually high number of different units and processors that handled specific tasks, which cluttered and complicated the programming process just as the accumulation of silverware complicates the dining experience. While all analogies have limits, the situation was akin to having a dinner table laid out with steak, lobster and soup, with tiny matching forks, knives and spoons: each food required using the proper utensils, and a good amount of planning and coordination to get a meal worth one’s while. Programming for the SFC/SNES required a good deal of knowledge on how to program for the FC/NES, along with a firm grasp of programming techniques for an esoteric arrangement of additional components. The small step forward the SFC took is echoed nowadays in internet communities dedicated to “homebrew” development and amateur programming. The NES enthusiasts gather on the NESDev portal to find and exchange on NES programming. At the time of writing, the best place for programmers interested in developing SNES games is the “SNES” subsection of the NESDev community, which illustrates the technological continuity between the 8-bit and 16-bit consoles quite clearly.

Most sources that discuss the technical specifications of systems conclude that the Super Famicom was, at heart, a slow machine, but more important, that its general architecture was a challenge to be overcome compared with the Mega Drive’s more familiar 68000 processor environment. The processing power of the SFC’s CPU was certainly not favoring Nintendo’s console, and it took time for game developers to master the intricacies of the system, as René Boutin from Sunsoft summarized:

You needed very good programmers to make use of these resources, since the central processor was pretty weak compared to the rest, and the system architecture was extremely complex. […] We used to call it a “fake 16-bit”; fundamentally, it was a custom 8-bit, with a few 16-bit functionalities. (Boutin in Audureau et al. 2013, 19)

From Sony with Love: The Audio Subsystem

The Super Famicom’s sound was praised by the press and fans for two reasons. The first is essentially technological: the SFC marked a transition or turn for game console music hardware by being based on sound samples, whereas previous consoles had used tone generators and frequency modulation (FM) synthesis (Collins 2008, 45–47). Each SFC game could feature its own sound samples to build distinct soundscapes in 8-channel stereo, a notable improvement over the Famicom’s monophonic channels with limited variance.

The second reason that the SFC’s audio was celebrated were the early published games for the system. Super Mario World and F-Zero, the two launch titles, provided a good demonstration of the variety that the audio subsystem allowed, from piano to electric guitars, trumpets to bongos. ActRaiser, released within weeks of the console’s launch, featured a soundtrack that stood out with its orchestral style, a rarity at the time. It utilized many different sound samples, all eight sound channels, and echo audio effects that widened the sound, giving the impression that a large number of instruments were used; with enough echo, a couple of string instruments could produce an impact similar to a whole string section instead. Compositionally, it explored a wide range of styles and moods, ranging from the dramatic film score to the epic brass-heavy orchestra, taking detours through soothing harps, peaceful village themes, and a variety of ethnic music.

Soon Super Famicom games pushed in all kinds of directions. Super Castlevania IV’s soundtrack took the famed series’ direction of dark upbeat rock flirting with metal to a graver, more serious level, just like Konami did for the graphics, with a more subdued color palette and away from the cartoonish style of previous Famicom iterations. The SFC sequel’s choices of samples and compositional direction (“baroque with jazzy flavors”; Mecheri 2014, 36) goes further in the dark and brooding direction, in what could be called “pop-gothic dark ambient.” Dark strings, ominous reeds, and church organs coexist with upbeat drums, bass grooves, and echo. Lots of echo, as if one were listening in a cathedral on the eve of Judgment Day.

Not all composers followed in the atmospheric or orchestral directions, however; building on the strength of samples, the SFC soundtracks were varied in their explorations. Melodic/symphonic epics appeared through The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, Final Fantasy II and III, Secret of Mana and Chrono Trigger; broody, foreboding atmospheric music in Super Ghouls ’n Ghosts and Super Metroid; playfully eclectic dance beats and synth-pop fused in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles IV: Turtles in Time and Street Fighter II, while hard rock and heavy metal/pop hybrids burned through Ys III: Wanderers from Ys, Battletoads in Battlemaniacs, Mega Man X, Final Fantasy Mystic Quest, and Rock n’Roll Racing, among others. Many SFC games had their soundtracks released in Japan, some of them becoming best sellers or seeing rearranged versions with rock bands or orchestras.

Advanced as it was, the audio took a back seat to the real priority targeted by the SFC/SNES: the graphics. Before getting to the pièce de résistance, however, we must first lay our hands on the silverware and discuss the Super Famicom and Super NES’s case and controller.

Hardware Design, from Console to Controllers

The Japanese and American consoles, like their predecessors, both featured an expansion port on their bottom. Nintendo had plans for a CD-ROM add-on and other peripherals, likely developments given the impending trajectory of multimedia devices that lay ahead (to be detailed in chapter 7) and in keeping with the prior Famicom Disk System. As can be seen in figure 4.1, the Super NES differed in shape from the Super Famicom, but not as much as the NES had differed from the Famicom.

Figure 4.1 Left: the Japanese Super Famicom; right: the Super NES.

Source: Evan Amos, Wikimedia Commons

Nintendo of America’s designer Lance Barr gave the Super NES harder, more angular lines to give the console a look closer to a domestic VCR and to give it some volume, as he found the Super Famicom looked like a bag of bread (Margetts and Ward 2012),³ a solution that also would better accommodate the sure-to-come expansions that would plug in from under the console. The angled top of the North American SNES also prevented people from leaving drinks on the machine, thus avoiding damaging spills. The light gray body and dark gray faceplate found on the Japanese system were also simplified into a uniform light gray body, except for the small, recessed dark gray eject switch and the two bright purple Power and Reset sliding switches.

Arguably, the most important departure from the original Japanese hardware is the replacement of the Super Famicom’s “colors of the rainbow” logo (visible on all marketing materials but also in-game in bright lights in Super Mario World’s Special World). The green, blue, red, and yellow circles deployed like the petals of a flower were replaced by a more sober, serious, and discrete purple-and-gray two-tone scheme. Unfortunately for technofetishists and purist aesthetes, these color palette changes weren’t the only ones: The SNES’s plastic casing contained a chemical flame retardant additive that causes unseemly yellowing discoloration in normal aging conditions—a modern form of tarnish for modern-day silverware.

Barr’s most important contribution, however, lies in the Super NES’s controller. The Super Famicom controllers had the SFC logo printed on them, which obviously had to go for the North American adaptation, but they also had the “colors of the rainbow” visually encoded in their buttons, as each of them took on one of the four colors. Barr replaced the red, yellow, blue, and green button colors with purple and lavender to go with the redesigned console’s sober light gray and purple theme. More important, however, he followed a conceptual trail that appeared in the SFC controllers by turning their shapes into two pairs of matching buttons. As can be seen in figure 4.2, the original SFC buttons were organized in pairs by two light gray diagonal oblongs, which visually defined the A/B and X/Y duets (in addition to their alphabetical split). The SNES controllers would match the buttons by their colors and shapes: X and Y would be concave and lavender, whereas A and B would be convex and purple.

Figure 4.2 Left: Super Famicom (top) and Super NES (bottom) controllers. (The L and R shoulder buttons are hidden by the photo’s angle.) Right: Famicom (top) and Genesis (bottom) controllers.

Source: Evan Amos, Wikimedia Commons

The decision was important because it made it easier for people to learn how to deal with this new four-button material interface. The buttons could be told apart by the touch only, rather than having to take the eyes away from the screen to look at the controller. Moreover, for people not quite used to the handling of video game controllers, the arrangement and shape of the buttons indicated the common way to place one’s fingers; the end of the thumb could be laid to rest gently into the concave groove of the X or Y button, with the convex shape of the A and B buttons making them easy to depress by flexing the thumb’s joint without moving it back and forth between buttons (a handling that had been necessary from the Famicom days of the Super Mario Bros. series, if one wanted to hold the run button while pressing the jump one). Together with the larger size and “dogbone” shape, the Super Famicom (and particularly the Super NES) provided a great improvement in video game controller ergonomics.

As for the controller’s functionality, Nintendo’s software orientation had led it to develop hardware according to the needs of its software. Just like the Famicom had been designed to play Donkey Kong (Altice 2015), the Super Famicom had been designed to play F-Zero, Pilotwings, and Super Mario Bros. 4, which in its earliest stages looked more like Super Mario Bros. 3–2, as can be seen in the Japanese press following Nintendo’s second SFC demonstration (Covell, “Super Famicom,” July 1989). The L and R shoulder buttons offered finer controls for turning left and right in addition to the directional pad’s four-way movement scheme, a forward-thinking innovation that mapped perfectly to tridimensional spaces. As Pilotwings (and later on Contra III: The Alien Wars and the Super Star Wars trilogy) exemplify, the direction of facing could be controlled with L and R rotations, whereas movement through translations was independently controlled by the directional pad. In this sense, the SNES prefigures the twin-joystick or mouse-and-keyboard control schemes that separate the “move” and “look” functions, which allows strafing in modern games.

The shoulder buttons would become a standard in video game controllers that persists to this day (with the PlayStation having expanded on it by featuring four shoulder buttons). More important, it further increased the total count of available buttons on the controller. Together with the four face buttons (twice as many as the Famicom and PC-Engine and one more than the Mega Drive), the Super Famicom gave opportunities for gamers and game developers alike to develop more complex games, a feature that would prove crucial in the platform’s success.

Controller Complexity: The Street Fighter II Lesson

One key game for which the controller made a significant difference was Street Fighter II. The 1991 smash-hit arcade game from Capcom caused a revival of the arcade market, which was slumping along after the glory days of the early 1980s. Street Fighter II was as popular in Japan as it was in North America and Europe, and it was so successful it spawned a whole genre of likewise fighting games. One reason for this success is that it was a technically accomplished game as far as controls went. Capcom’s programmers and engineers perfected programming routines and button wiring that made it possible to execute complex multibutton and joystick manipulations for special moves that differed for each character. The arcade game, like its predecessor, had six different attacks (quick, medium, and strong punch and quick, medium, and strong kick), which together formed the nexus of strategy and skill that players had to develop and master in their quest to become the World Warrior. Moreover, the three-level grading of attacks affected the characters’ all-important special moves: Executing the same maneuver using the strong punch or strong kick instead of their quick or medium grades resulted in a Hadoken fireball traveling faster across the screen or a spinning kick reaching farther. The complexity of mechanics and control system, along with a delicate balance among the game’s characters that prevented one of them from overpowering the rest, made it an intensely competitive game.

The popularity of the game of course demanded ports for home video game consoles. The 16-bit Nintendo version was the first to reach the market in the summer of 1992 and featured a 16-megabit cartridge, which still wasn’t enough to guarantee an integral replication of the arcade experience. Bonus stages were modified, some background elements in the levels were abandoned or simplified, some voices were cut out, and some script and storyline changes were made. But these features were all auxiliary to the game’s main interest. The most important things about Street Fighter II, those that defined its identity and made it interesting, were the characters, their special moves, and the game’s controls and three-grade attacks. In this respect, the SFC/SNES had it all.

Although the Super Famicom had been selling well in Japan, in North America, the Super NES was still slumping against the Sega Genesis, and many consumers were holding out on the upgrade cycle. Street Fighter II functioned as a killer app for the SNES, selling 6.3 million units worldwide (in no small part thanks to Nintendo creating a SNES Street Fighter II bundle), compared with 1.65 million for the later September 1993 Sega Genesis version, superlatively titled Street Fighter II’: Special Champion Edition. By then the SFC/SNES had also received a follow-up, Street Fighter II Turbo (July/August 1993), based on the arcades Street Fighter II’ Turbo: Hyper Fighting and Street Fighter II’: Champion Edition. The latter was soon superseded by Super Street Fighter II (June 1994), just in time for the game’s two-year anniversary. Aside from looking like a creativity contest for Capcom’s marketers, the titles show that the “turbo-mega-super generation” logic wasn’t restricted to platform owners. In the end, the three SFC/SNES releases reached a combined total of more than 12 million copies, against 1.65 million for the Mega Drive/Genesis.

The extreme discrepancy in sales is partly explained by the fact that the SFC/SNES benefitted from a long first-mover advantage. However, the impact of the consoles’ controllers is what truly made the difference. The Sega Genesis controllers had three regular face buttons and a fourth “Start” one, which cut right into the core premise of the game’s three-graded punch and kick attacks. Playing on the Sega Genesis meant using the A, B, and C buttons to make quick, medium, and strong attacks, with the Start button toggling between punches and kicks. The awkward toggling mechanism completely broke the flow of the game by making it impossible to rapidly alternate between punches and kicks. A veteran Guile player hurling Sonic Booms with his punches would furiously reach for the Start button if the opponent jumped over them and most likely would never switch to kicks in time to fire off a Flash Kick against the airborne attacker. Genesis owners looking for the authentic arcade experience had to buy a special six-button controller—or two of them if they wanted to play against a family member or a friend, which is the main point in playing these kinds of games. Instead, they could get an SNES and the game, which netted them access to a whole other game library—another sign that consumers desire games, not technology in itself, as we have seen in chapter 2.

Now, with our silverware interface in hand, we are almost ready to get to the Super Famicom’s main course—the graphics. First, we must get through the entrée, the smaller course that will prepare us to fully appreciate the main course: the conflicting role of graphics in video games.

The Graphics Matter

The importance given to graphics in video games predates Nintendo’s 16-bit system. It also predates its 8-bit predecessor. A two-page advertisement for the Intellivision titled “two pictures are worth a thousand words” had used the “graphics argument” in the early 1980s, claiming that the Intellivision’s advanced graphics clearly showed how advanced the system was compared with the Atari 2600. Focusing on graphics has always been a good strategy, one that Nintendo had simply followed with the Famicom. The console’s distinguishing architectural feature had been the creation of a separate processor to manage graphics (the PPU), a “major design innovation” that “improved and simplified the way graphics were stored and delivered to the screen. It also allowed the CPU of the console to spend more time doing game-related operations and less time doing graphics-related operations” (O’Donnell 2011, 94). Altice (2015, 29–30), however, explains that this “contribution” to game hardware design was in all likelihood lifted from Coleco’s Colecovision machine.

In any case, this architecture is a substantial turning point in the history of game platforms and has been a constant in video game hardware since the Famicom. By dedicating special resources to graphics instead of treating them as part of the CPU’s workload just like every other computing operation (artificial intelligence routines, storage and retrieval of data values, management of controller input, and so on), the Famicom/NES’s hardware architecture had singled them out as an area that merited more care and attention. That the PC-Engine would feature a 16-bit coprocessor dedicated to graphics—and, even more clearly, that the entire platform was built from Hudson’s initial project of developing a graphics chip to extend the Famicom’s graphical capabilities in the first place—demonstrate how influential Nintendo’s success with the Famicom and NES was and how engineers understood it as a demonstration of the supremacy of graphics in video game technology.

Indeed, as we have seen in chapter 2, graphical technologies are of paramount importance when considering the launch of a platform because they can spur technological adoption and start the virtuous cycle of confidence by developers and consumers. Hence, graphics, when envisioned in the context of technological innovation, act as a conceptual interface that allows consumers and third-party developers to get a glimpse of the underlying, invisible technologies. Launch and early titles (as well as other flagship titles, such as Sega’s Sonic the Hedgehog or id Software’s Doom and Quake) cannot be thought of as simply providing entertainment to consumers. Instead, these games become rhetorical devices in themselves, parts of a wider discourse from a platform owner that attempts to seduce and convince third-party game developers and consumers to choose their own technology over that of competitors.

Although graphics have always been leveraged into rhetorics of persuasion from console manufacturers, the fourth generation of game consoles made it particularly evident. Electronic Gaming Monthly, as part of their feature on the coming 16-Bit consoles, offered a preview of the Sega Genesis. A frame titled “8-Bit VS. 16-Bit…a difference you can see” presents side-by-side screenshots of Altered Beast for the 8-bit Sega Master System and what could either be a screenshot from the arcade version or a preview of the upcoming Sega Genesis version. As much as the article praises graphics, it also frames them critically, the second title reading, “The Genesis games—only good looks?” and the text, “The first Genesis games are spectacular in appearance, but fall flat in some important areas of game play” (EGM #2, July/August 1989, 37).

This article crystallizes the gaming community’s love/hate relationship with graphics. On the one hand, gaming culture manages a special place for graphics and endlessly discusses them as part of the never-ending quest toward realism, photorealism, or visual aesthetics in general, making graphics and visual style an argument for the artistry of video games. On the other hand, gaming culture’s dominant discourse has adopted a critical stance toward graphics as well, urging gamers to go beyond “eye candy” in search of wholesome, nutritive food and to avoid flash and style and go for the real meat and substance: “gameplay,” however it’s defined (and most often isn’t). A crass term even exists (indicative of the historical gender politics of gamer culture) to dismiss people who value graphics over gameplay: “graphics whore.” This shows how graphics were sometimes positioned at one end of an axis, opposed to gameplay: The games were either pretty and shallow or ugly and deep. Although caricatural, this framing still accounts for ambivalent sentiments toward video game graphics.

Beyond “Eye Candy”: Graphical Regimes

To resolve this tension, Pierre-Marc Côté and I have proposed the concept of graphical regime. Inspired by the concept of technological regime (Nelson and Winter 1982, Winter 1984), which is the set of particular knowledge environments where firms engage in problem-solving activities, the graphical regime is defined as “the junction point between gameplay and graphics” and “the imaging of gameplay and the gameplay of the image, independently of the technological graphical capabilities or limitations” (Arsenault and Côté 2013). The idea is that in video games, graphics are both something nice to look at (an aesthetic object) and something that is interacted with (a functional object). Thus, graphical innovations may be cases of radical innovation (Norman and Verganti 2012) when they open new graphical regimes (i.e., new ways of playing with the image or new ways to set in images the gameplay). Those that do not demonstrate new modes of gameplay and are simply regarded as upgrading the fidelity, resolution, or “polish effect” that graphics can provide are instead instances of incremental innovation and may be rejected as simple “eye candy” for impressionable consumers who don’t know better.

In a later publication (Arsenault, Côté, and Larochelle 2015), we detailed the various components that make up a graphical regime by developing the unified Framework for the Analysis of Visual Representation, the game FAVR. Although I won’t go into details for every component, generally, a graphical regime includes a certain interface and disposition of elements across the screen (the composition); a certain point of view, such as first-person, third-person, cinematic camera, and so on (the ocularization); a framing mechanism (implying an anchor; i.e., what is being targeted by the view, and a mobility range, or what triggers the viewpoint’s movement); and a configuration of in-game space that involves the type of graphical projection method (perspective, isometric, etc.), viewing angle (bird’s eye view, top-down, horizontal, etc.), and pictorial materials (pixels, vectors, polygons, etc.).⁴

What this means is that we can describe a graphical regime like the “side-scroller” in Super Mario Bros. 3 and Super Mario World (by no means exclusive to these two games) by noting it has a full-screen game space (complemented by a data interface ribbon), displaying a world in external ocularization with a horizontal angle, with the view anchored on Mario with a connected mobility (moving Mario makes the frame move along with him), and where every element of characters and backgrounds is represented in raster graphics (grids of colored pixels). When we turn to New Super Mario Bros., we find that the side-scrolling 2-D game can be implemented in a 3-D engine. The only difference between SMW and NSMB is the visual materials, which evolved from raster graphics to 3-D polygons. At heart, however, these different technologies partake in the same graphical regime, the same gameplay/image relationship, making them squarely part of a process of incremental innovation.

The concept of graphical regime is useful in theorizing the role of technological innovation for platforms and, as such, will form the backbone of my discussion of the SFC’s graphical innovations. In general, the Super Famicom’s graphics can be understood in two broad categories. Incremental innovations include the colors, sprites, and multilayered backgrounds the platform offers, which have facilitated a number of graphical programming and design techniques that were in use at the time. The SFC’s unique contribution to video game graphics, “Mode 7,” is a mixed item, offering both incremental innovation through matrix transformations and radical innovation in perspective projection.

The SFC’s Graphical Infrastructure

In conservative logic, the Super Famicom would iterate on the Famicom’s contributions to video game hardware and simply “go for more” with a careful balance of finely tuned innovation; the console would excel at doing better what the Famicom was doing before. The main substance of gameplay rested on sprites, the moving and animated on-screen objects and characters, and tiles, the blocks that made up a game’s background. Both of these could be handled for the Super Famicom in the same way as for the Famicom, allowing developers to transfer their expertise to the new system.

The common programming logic for both systems was that, given memory limitations, graphical elements had to be broken down in tiles of 8 x 8 pixels, which could be organized in larger sets (metatiles or metasprites) by supplying a tilemap, a list of which tiles should go where. The PPU sorted through all the elements to be displayed and hierarchized them, drawing sprites on top of backgrounds. To achieve scrolling, the system prepared extra columns or rows of (meta)tiles beyond what the screen could display. With proper timing and (very) efficient coding, the fragile illusion of a cohesive world filled with characters, scrolling by in a smooth movement, could be maintained. Efficiency was mandatory because the console needed to output the entire screen’s graphics 60 times per second. If any part of the computations wasn’t ready in time, then a frame had to be skipped while the processing finished the job, which resulted in slowdowns.⁵

SFC (meta)sprites could have sizes ranging from 8 x 8 to 64 x 64 pixels, but the console could only display sprites of two different sizes at once; it was 8 x 8 and 16 x 16 sprites, 8 x 8 and 32 x 32 ones, and so on. Up to 128 of them could appear at once—at least theoretically. In practice, the SFC’s limitations in processing speed, as well as a limit of 32 sprites on a single horizontal line, proved severe and caused problems of sprite flickering. If more than 32 sprites were to appear on a single line, then the PPU could render them on alternate frames, making them rapidly flicker between visible and invisible in a ghostlike fashion.

The issues of flicker and slowdown would plague most Super Famicom games in any sprite-heavy action sequence and remained a constant issue for the platform. Early shooters (shoot’em ups) such as Gradius III (1990)—a launch title for the U.S. release of the Super NES—Super R-Type (1991), Earth Defense Force (1991), or Thunder Spirits (1991) were beset with slowdowns and flicker. This outcome is rather unsurprising considering the typical hails of bullets, missiles, rockets, and ships that fly around in every direction in this game genre. Nevertheless, the issues crept across all kinds of games and in all kinds of moments. In the Landspeeder piloting stage in the Tatooine desert of Super Star Wars, sprites accumulate as the screen gets filled with Jawas, Sandtroopers, hopping creatures, explosions, bullets, health power-ups, cacti, and rocks, causing noticeable slowdown. In Contra III: The Alien Wars, a car must be blown up right at the beginning of the game, and the explosion uses too many sprites, which causes noticeable slowdown. Level bosses explode when they are defeated, causing noticeable slowdown. In stage 3, the Tri-Transforming Mecha Wall Walker traps the player(s) between its legs—which are made of rotating sprites—and launches rockets, causing noticeable slowdown. Slowdown was so present that it sometimes came to be not only noticeable but desirable; some players (like me) purposely sprayed bullets around during this sequence to exploit the added slowdown, which helped with fallible human reflexes.⁶

The SFC lagged behind its competitors when dealing with sprites and scrolling, but one of its strongest advantages was its phenomenal range of colors. The Genesis and TurboGrafx-16 had 9-bit palettes that offered 512 colors; the SFC’s 15-bit palette had a whopping 32,768 colors available to choose from. Yet that spectacular number (once again repeated ad nauseam in Nintendo’s promotion practices and specs comparisons in magazines) didn’t translate directly on the screen at once. Sprites could each have 16 colors, which was a lot more than the Famicom’s three-color sprites,⁷ but the total number of on-screen colors depended on the background. The SFC featured multiple graphics modes that specified a number of background layers and a color palette for them, ranging from 16 to 256 colors. The system’s quirk is that overlapping background colors could be mixed in together through limited, but at the time impressive, transparency options and color averaging algorithms. The average value between two overlapping colors could be computed and rendered on-screen, which increased the effective color count and perceived visual richness. In the end, however, advertising 32,768 colors was more of a marketing ploy than an account of the visual experience because most games would end up with somewhere between 90 and 150 on-screen colors at a time.⁸

Colors, Resolution, and Backgrounds

The most determining visual feature of the Super Famicom was its eight graphics modes, hard-set combinations of certain numbers of background layers, with varying trade-offs between color palettes and resolution. This choice in designing the hardware indicates a first kind of form-setting on Nintendo’s part, as it meant the platform was expressly designed to support some kinds of imaging, according to what the firm felt could be “standard” or useful. Modes 0 through 4 offered two to four background layers, with 4 to 256 colors. Modes 5 and 6 offered a higher resolution of 512 horizontal pixels but did so at a heavy price for colors, a price that few developers were willing to pay. Seeing the notable exception RPM Racing is enough to understand why; although the game was made for the same platform and by the same team than the later Rock n’ Roll Racing, the limited amount of on-screen colors makes it look closer to its 8-bit predecessor R.C. Pro-Am.

The “Hi-Res” modes weren’t supposed to make SFC games play in 512 x 448 resolution, although Nintendo’s promotional discourse and even the specs comparisons in magazines listed that impressively high number everywhere. The real reason for this particular graphical mode was to allow Japanese games to display kanji. It had made a strong impression on the press during the 1989 Nintendo conference that unveiled the Super Famicom. A screenshot of a 16-bit remake of Zelda II: The Adventure of Link was shown, with a dialogue box displaying kanji. That moment was a technical achievement for console game graphics, a strong cultural signifier of Japan, and a promise of richer, fuller game dialogues and storylines—a promise that dating sims and visual novels, chiefly Tokimeki Memorial, would fulfill, along with RPGs.

Many games produced for the Super Famicom used the Hi-Res mode to display Japanese characters, considerably increasing the mileage of the limited screen estate. Secret of Mana and its Japan-exclusive sequel, Seiken Densetsu 3, are perhaps the most well-known games to have used the hi-res mode for the full-screen menus and dialogue boxes, but they were not the only ones; various games used it for menus, title screens, and credit rolls, from Final Fantasy III and Lufia II: Rise of the Sinistrals to Kirby’s Dream Land 3 and Jurassic Park, as well as Smash Tennis and Donkey Kong Country.

Mode 7, the last of these graphics modes, will get its own separate discussion later. For now, it is worth reflecting on the possibilities and logic behind the multiple backgrounds in modes 0 to 6.

The evolution of video game graphics can be framed as an accelerated re-creation of the evolution of traditional animation film. Early arcade games and home consoles had to completely redraw the picture every frame, just as some early pioneers of animation. As a result, backgrounds were either completely absent, which justifies the many early games taking place in space or against empty backgrounds, as well as the Magnavox Odyssey’s plastic overlays to be fixed on the TV screen. Likewise, many of the earliest animated films featured an artist drawing on an easel (The Enchanted Drawing by James Stuart Blackton) or a chalkboard (Blackton’s Humorous Phases of Funny Faces, Émile Cohl’s Fantasmagorie), with no complementary scenery. This strategy eliminated the hundreds of tedious background recopyings that would have been required—one for each frame of film (Winsor McCay’s 1914 film Gertie the Dinosaur provides a nice example).⁹

Animators, however, thought of ways to speed up the laborious process. The easiest solution was to separate the animated characters from the largely static backgrounds so they would not have to be redrawn every time. In the 1910s, Raoul Barré devised a “slash system.” A pile of papers would be stacked and fixed in place through perforations and pegs. Because a detailed drawing of a scene would have animated characters or objects only in a certain part of the picture, the artist would tear away that region and draw the next phase of movement, keeping the remainder of the scene’s drawing for the next frames. This technique was eventually superseded by Earl Hurd’s celluloid sheet (or “cel”), invented in 1914 but patented and expensive. This system allowed artists to draw characters on transparent sheets that could be stacked on top of detailed background pictures. Here, we see the sprite-and-background structure that video games have quickly adopted and that characterized the Famicom.

Multiplane Cameras, Animetic Space, and Parallax Effects

The next step in film animation had been the multiplication of background layers, a logical extension because transparent cels could be stacked over each other. The Super Famicom (and the Sega Genesis before it) would follow the path of animation film and develop their own software equivalent of the multiplane camera. German animator Lotte Reiniger had developed a multiplane camera for her 1926 film The Adventures of Prince Achmed, the world’s first feature-length animated film, besting the Walt Disney Studios on both counts by 10 years. But while she invented it, Disney exhibited and popularized the invention by discussing the studio’s own multiplane camera in trailers and previews for its upcoming 1937 Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs feature film—a promotional philosophy of foregrounding technology that is not unlike Nintendo’s own practices, a fact that strangely resonates with the shared history between the two firms, as we’ll see in chapter 6.

The multiplane camera was a technical infrastructure designed to hold several cels on transparent glass layers, fixed in front of a film camera that would photograph one frame at a time and with independent controls to manipulate them. Cels with characters (“sprites”) could be sandwiched between a background cel and a cel with foreground elements (“backgrounds”), giving a sense of depth to the picture. Figure 4.3 presents an example of this impression of depth resulting from a flat drawing being superimposed over the main plane where the player-character runs and fights.

Figure 4.3 The *Super Star Wars* cantina stage (left) and the mountain cave in *Soul Blazer* (right) both resort to foreground elements to induce a sense of spatial depth, whether in side view with nearer patrons or in top-down view with hanging icicles. Emulated on Higan v0.95.

The kind of depth achieved here, however, is markedly different from that which can be reached through traditional cameras and our own embodied experience of space in everyday life. This “layered space” (Picard 2010, 252–264) is made up of flat bidimensional planes separated by an “animetic interval” (Lamarre 2009); in short, an animetic space, which is different from cinematic space. As Côté, Larochelle, and I wrote earlier, “To a large degree, this difference can be attributed to the difference between 3D and 2D graphics” (Arsenault, Côté, and Larochelle 2015, 98). The Super Famicom’s built-in capacity to display up to four background layers brought it into the realm of the animetic. In this the platform is part of a larger conceptual transition toward the key technique used in film animation: compositing. No multiplication of 2-D planes, however, would ever bring it into the 3-D, cinematic space that polygons would eventually provide.

Just like the multiplane camera allowed individual cels to be displaced left or right in front of the camera, so could each SFC background layer be moved at different speeds, thus achieving a parallax effect. Motion parallax is a depth cue by which the closer an object lies in front of us, the faster it scrolls by as we move—and, conversely, the farther away it stands, the slower it will move. Up until the Mega Drive and Super Famicom, the parallax effect had been implemented in select video games such as Jungle Hunt and Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back for the Atari VCS or Bucky O’Hare and Joe & Mac for the Famicom. The effect had been difficult to pull off with a single mass of undifferentiated background graphics; the Super Famicom and its multiple backgrounds in most graphics modes would make this easy. Consequently, a great number of games featured motion parallax effects.

Certainly the most egregious case is found in Jim Power: The Lost Dimension in 3-D (Loriciel 1993), where the background layers move in increased speed the farther away they are from the viewpoint, in addition to moving in opposite directions and lacking proper color-shading to approximate atmospheric perspective¹⁰; these combined factors make the game disorienting if not sickening. U.N. Squadron made good (if somewhat straightforward) use of multilayered parallax. More inspired uses could be found in Ys III: Wanderers from Ys, where the town of Redmont was given a more lifelike feel thanks to another street scrolling by as a secondary background glimpsed between buildings; in ActRaiser’s Bloodpool-1 action level, the titular pool stretching out in the background has distinct currents flowing at different speeds, thereby attracting visual attention and gaining volume.

The addition of scrolling background layers was an incremental step up in the current paradigm of 2-D games. Although it was often used as little more than a cosmetic upgrade,¹¹ it sometimes impacted gameplay and offered slight novelty effects. In Super Mario World’s “Forest of Illusion 1” and “Outrageous” levels, trees are displayed on a background layer that’s actually placed in the foreground, hiding the sprites and game terrain, creating occlusion and potentially hiding traps or secrets. More interesting, in Iggy’s Castle, Mario can leap onto a giant grating suspended in mid-air, punch through revolving grates to find himself behind the grate, and give chase to koopas that are clinging on either side.

Exploring the intervals between layered space was not new in itself, of course; Super Mario Bros. 3 had famously hidden a warp flute behind the exit to level 1–3, which could be reached if Mario ducked for several seconds on a white block, getting him behind the scenery. However, the fact that the Super Famicom could manage multiple background layers in hardware, by itself, as opposed to necessitating hand-programming techniques, greatly facilitated a widespread usage of such visual and gameplay motifs. This constitutes a genuine case of incremental innovation, albeit one on which Sega had already focused with its Mega Drive/Genesis, which allowed three background layers and enough on-screen sprites that some developers built a whole additional background layer out of sprite tiles (MacDonald 2000). Once more, Nintendo was incrementing on past innovations to catch up.

The Special Effects of Mode 7

The most notable graphical contribution of the Super Famicom was graphics Mode 7. As the SFC’s slowdown problems were more and more acknowledged by the press (and experienced by gamers), Sega seized the opportunity and positioned itself (and its cool Sonic mascot) as being all about speed, thanks to the Genesis’s mysteriously unique “Blast Processing” programming. In retaliation, Nintendo focused on its own unique asset for the SNES: “Mode 7.” Much touted in discourse, the eighth graphics mode (counting from 0) allowed a single background layer—but one with up to 256 colors—that could be subjected to geometric matrix transformations: rotation, scaling, translation, reflection, and shearing. All of these, except for shearing, were incidentally possible for animated film: rotation of one or multiple cels was always possible, translation was controlled by rotary levers that could slide cels left or right (into or out of the camera’s frame), scaling worked by having the camera travel in or zoom in on the cels, and reflection could be handled with mirrors or other post-filming duplication techniques.

One particularly popular use for scaling, rotation, and translation of backgrounds was the title screens. By and large, SFC games have title screens that practically dislocated their letters trying to outperform their rivals in generating a spontaneous “wow factor”. Titles zoomed in (or out) dramatically, spiraled around into view, crashed into the screen, and basically spare no effort in maximizing Mode 7 effects to impress players.¹² Although we often forget or minimize the importance of title screens, they deserve our attention as possibly the one part of the peritext (see chapter 3) that has the greatest impact in shaping our expectations and preparing us for the text we are about to experience. Game manuals could be left in the box, and the game box often featured art that had little or no relation to game graphics; the text on its back could be forgotten, misremembered, or simply unavailable (as when a friend lent a cartridge or when contemporary players use an emulator), but there was no avoiding the title screen. Collectively, they indicate a crucial direction in which the Super Famicom’s graphics hardware was pushing: toward the implementation of special effects. Indeed, Electronic Gaming Monthly reported in October 1990 that “the current working title of the new Nintendo super machine is the NES-SFX (for Nintendo Entertainment System-Special Effects)” (EGM #15, October 1990, 30), and many reader letters from the same issue confirm that the name had caught on already. The Super Famicom’s architectural philosophy could be summarized as incremental improvements over familiar games and graphical special effects to dazzle viewers.

Moving toward in-game content, the Mode 7 dramatic zoom was a popular special effect. Contra III: The Alien Wars had a bomber plane flying toward the screen and bombing the ground in the first level, similar to when Bowser flies through the screen in the final fight of Super Mario World. Super Metroid used the same device when Ridley kidnaps the Metroid hatchling in the introduction taking place in the Ceres space colony. These effects were all implemented through Mode 7, which is only applied on backgrounds not sprites. In all of these cases, the characters had been rendered on screen as backgrounds, making them unable to collide with the player or otherwise interact with the in-game sprites. In other words, it was all for show. When Bowser rushes toward the screen until he passes right through the player’s face during the final fight of Super Mario World, he obeys the logic of the special effect much more than that of gameplay innovation; Bowser could have just as well went offscreen by a lateral translation toward the screen’s edge.

Game environments, being always backgrounds, were more naturally subjected to matrix transformations than characters or vehicles. In a large number of cases, though, the visual effects had little direct impact on the gameplay. When discussing the Mode 7 effects and multiplane scrolling in Axelay, whose box promises “graphically shocking 3-D levels,” Kurt Kalata (2009, 6) dismisses them as “gimmicky effects.” The same could be said of Super Castlevania IV’s stage 4–3, where the background wall is stretched and scrolled with an effect that gives the illusion that Simon Belmont is progressing through a tubelike environment. It makes for spectacular scenery, but the background graphics could be ripped out without altering the gameplay of this stage, which still consists of jumping across platforms and whipping enemies in a side-scrolling graphical regime. (Arguably, the background may be said to impact gameplay because it distracts the player, but if this is so, then any kind of distracting background, Mode 7 or not, would perform the same function.)

A number of games used a “mirage” effect by setting a back-and-forth shearing transformation across the lines of the picture. Quintet’s “Soul” conceptual series uses the mirage effect for different purposes throughout its games. In ActRaiser, it creates a blizzard during the boss battle in the Northwall region’s second stage. In Soul Blazer, it is used to represent “dazzling space” in the final World of Evil and for an aurora borealis when standing atop the Mountain of Souls. Extreme heat is another common use for Mode 7 shearing, as in the Natives’ Village in Illusion of Gaia or the background buildings in the burning village at the start of Castlevania: Dracula X. In Breath of Fire, the mirage effect appears in underwater environments to simulate the distortion caused by water ripples.

Sometimes, game environments had matrix transformations applied to them that went beyond graphical “eye candy” effects and impacted gameplay. In Super Metroid, after the Ceres space station’s self-destruct sequence has been activated, the vertical shaft through which the player must climb swings erratically from side to side, thanks to a Mode 7 rotation that’s carefully engineered to appear out of control, as the surroundings stray out of the screen’s surface and complicate the player’s escape. In Super Mario World 2: Yoshi’s Island, when Yoshi eats or touches the spiky Fuzzy clouds in level 1–7 (“Touch Fuzzy, Get Dizzy!”), the ground starts to rise and fall in a wavy pattern as backgrounds get distorted and saturated colors and pitch-shifted music create an effect that gamers on the Internet often compare to hallucinations provoked by LSD.

The idea of environmental rotation is pushed even further in Super Castlevania IV’s stage 4–2. Here the player progresses through a set of rooms where some of the walls, ceiling, and floor are covered in lethal spikes. Rings laid out in mid-air can be activated, making the room revolve 90 degrees around the player and effectively turning open ceilings into corridors and gravity into a guide for the player to progress forward. Here, the graphical effect of rotation is exploited in service of an innovative gameplay proposition, even if it is only a one-time gameplay effect. This idea was elevated to become the key game mechanic in SOS (Human Entertainment, 1994), a game where a side-scrolling game environment literally revolves around the player-character to open or block possibilities for spatial navigation. As the ship sinks, tosses, and turns, the player must walk on the walls and ceilings that have become floors to access new areas. Currently labeled by Wikipedia as a “survival adventure,” a term that aptly describes the game, it stands as one of the truly original titles for the SNES.

The independently scrolling background layers and rotation, scaling, translation, and reflection Mode 7 transformations were the Super Famicom’s central incremental innovations, contributing to perfect the already well-established graphical regimes of the side-scroller and top-down view, and their related genres: the platformer, the action-adventure, and the shoot’em up, among others.

Beyond Graphics and into Genre Innovation

Although often stated in retrospective articles dedicated to the console, the strength of the SNES’ (and SFC’s) game library requires serious attention from the perspective of genre because it highlights the two modalities of generic evolution, which I introduced in an earlier journal article: reiteration and innovation (Arsenault 2009). The importance of generic templates in game design, which Ernest Adams (2009) attributes to Nintendo’s draconian publishing policies with the NES platform, reaches its apex during the 1990s on the Super NES, where the many incremental technology advances favor reiteration.

The industrialization process that took over Japan and the United States, and the resulting lack of game diversity that resulted from it, is easily demonstrated if we look at the context of Europe, where microcomputers ruled the roost in the 1980s. The Sinclair ZX Spectrum, for instance, held a position in the United Kingdom similar to Nintendo’s NES and Famicom—an inexpensive game machine that met with success amid the masses, except for the heavy industrialization. Instead, a “proto-industrial push” happened, thanks to a direction of “homebrew” development, spurred by game magazines that printed code for Sinclair owners to type in their own games. In the words of Skot Deeming, curator of an exhibit on homebrew development on the ZX Spectrum at the Université de Montréal, this amateur development culture was free from the imperatives of profitability, which resulted in a lot of formal explorations away from conventions.¹³

As a design practice, video games are always, at least somewhat, about innovation and problem solving, a reality that lends itself relatively well to an evolutionary conception of game genres (Arsenault 2009). A game is often produced following model games, genres, or design features that are blended together with some unique new propositions. As Alastair Fowler noted when discussing literary genres, “What produces generic resemblances, reflection soon shows, is tradition: a sequence of influence and imitation and inherited codes connecting works in the genre” (Fowler 1982, 42). These series of influences trace certain trajectories of innovation, nondeterministic paths that offer enough leeway or the freedom to go in another direction entirely but that favor some experimentations over others (especially in the video game business, where the industrial risk is high given the “hit-driven” nature of the market, and where innovation may not translate into accrued sales).

Games may be labeled as “belonging” to any number of genres, defined according to multiple criteria, and this labeling may differ from one community to another. Ultimately, genre does not correspond, as in biology, to innate features that some games would have in common in any objective or positivist manner; genre labeling is a discursive act that frames an existing game in a certain way, and genres are such linguistic codifications, shifting, imprecise, and always culturally situated (Arsenault 2009). That is why Thomas Schatz described genre in Hollywood as “a range of expression for filmmakers and a range of experience for viewers” (Schatz 1981, 22). This framing of how genre operates is not restricted to Hollywood but also functions in other industrial and heavily marketed entertainment sectors. What distinguishes games from literature and film, from a generic standpoint, is that sometimes trajectories of innovation in gameplay stem from or otherwise interact with technological trajectories.

Erwan Cario (2013) refers to the 1990–1995 period as “the Age of Genres,” a time where, aided by the relative stability of technology between the third and fourth generation of game consoles (as we’ve seen in the discussion of the Super Famicom’s architecture), game developers experimented with original controls, interfaces, and ways to play. Successes were copied fast, and “practically all major genres of the modern video game have their origin (or their confirmation) in these early 1990s” (Cario 2013). If we try to chart out the genres that find their origin in this period (through processes of innovation) and those that find their confirmation (through the process of reiteration), the question of platforms inevitably surfaces, as innovation was unequally distributed. Nintendo’s platform favors reiteration across already proven genres (mainly platform games, turn-based role-playing games, and 2-D action/adventures) and largely integrates its graphical technical innovations into these gameplay reiterations.

Although 2-D platformers and action/adventure games with spectacular visual effects were all the rage on the SNES, the personal computer, bolstered by new technologies (chiefly CD-ROM storage and real-time 3-D polygon rendering), engaged in experimentation through a number of new genres: full-motion video (FMV) games with digitized footage, 3-D action/adventures, the ubiquitous first-person shooter, and the real-time strategy genres. The Sega Genesis and TurboGrafx-16 were situated somewhere in between these two poles, with an abundance of classic games but also CD-ROM add-ons (and the 32X for Sega’s machine) to engage with these new genres. In contrast, the SNES genre par excellence was the platform game (a legacy inherited from the NES) and its corresponding subgenres: the run-and-gun, the cinematic platformer, and the puzzle platformer. The fighting game and top-down action-adventure complemented the platformer and made up the bulk of the SNES library.

Sega cultivated a risk-taking approach that was compatible with its general philosophy of letting the consumer decide in the end (Harris 2014, 280). The Sega Activator, for instance, took motion gaming further than Bandai’s PowerPad accessory for the NES. Contrast this to Nintendo’s Super Scope accessory, a light gun turned light bazooka, whose main innovations over the preceding NES Zapper were being wireless and bigger (and, I suppose, not being named “Super Zapper”). Third-party developer Code Masters created the J-Cart, an oversized Genesis cartridge standard that also included two additional controller ports on the cartridge to allow four-player gameplay—an idea simply infeasible under Nintendo’s manufacturing stranglehold over their platform.

All of this isn’t to say that Super Famicom games never experimented with innovative control schemes, gameplay mechanics, or spatial treatment. E.V.O.: Search for Eden presented an audacious mixing of adventure and RPG elements that enriched the platformer genre by making the player spend “experience points” to upgrade body parts, evolving into different life forms throughout the adventure. Nosferatu offered a synthesis of cinematic platformer à la Prince of Persia and beat-them-all game with a variety of fighting moves and dynamic combat. In Dragon View, the player gains experience, levels, and inventory in nonlinear exploration, like in most RPGs, but fights enemies in a real-time, beat-them-all formula. These examples show that innovation could creep in through genre-crossing features, as long as they revolved around established genres.

Innovation often manifested itself in a different way: New gameplay possibilities were first integrated as specific parts or alternative modes in the context of a larger, more traditional game type. ActRaiser, for one, combined two wildly different game genres—the side-scrolling action platformer and city-building simulation—into an integrated ludic proposal. Overhead levels were interspersed between classic run and gun levels in Contra III: The Alien Wars just like the Mode 7 vehicle levels in the Super Star Wars trilogy broke the usual platforming structure. Although the canceled SNES-CD would rule out any FMV game on the SNES, the SNES mouse peripheral did yield access to one thing that PC gamers had: the strategy, puzzle, and CRPG genres that were all the rage on there and couldn’t be found in arcades or at friends’ houses with other consoles. A good range of titles were ported to the SNES: SimCity, Lemmings 2: The Tribes, Cannon Fodder, Sid Meier’s Civilization, Might & Magic III: Isles of Terra, Eye of the Beholder, SimAnt, Utopia, Populous II, and Nobunaga’s Ambition, one of the earliest examples of complex grand strategy war games. There are few original strategy titles to balance out this slew of ported games, however, King Arthur’s World being one—although originality, here as elsewhere in the SFC’s library, is a contentious descriptor, seeing how King Arthur’s World was basically Lemmings in swords and chainmail.

Super Castlevania IV is a great example of the SFC’s graphical technologies being designed to support “special effects” for classically proven gameplay ideas. The game’s first level is pretty much a guided tour to special effects on the SNES. The first gameplay screen features parallax scrolling backgrounds, as the skull-shaped mountain range in the background layer, scrolling slower than the walls immediately around the player, are designed just high enough to occlude the moon in the high sky. The drawbridge closes (through Mode 7 rotation) as soon as the player steps on it. Coming into the next screen, an iron fence is raised, and the player must pass through a door to cross behind it, navigating through different background layers like the revolving doors in Super Mario World’s Iggy’s castle. Then the map in between levels is rendered in Mode 7 so that we may get the zoom on it, and in later levels we find the previously mentioned revolving room and the spinning tube background.

Still later in Super Castlevania IV, Simon fights the oversized Stone Golem Koronot, who gets wracked with a mosaic tiling effect and shrinks in size every time it is hit. These Mode 7 effects can work because the golem is rendered as a background rather than sprites. Unfortunately, as Mode 7 could only support a single background layer, the actual scenery had to be sacrificed, making the boss encounter appear against a pitch black background. Here the Super Famicom is incrementing on a familiar design pattern born out of necessity on the Famicom (Altice 2015, 232–237), promoting continuity in succession through the special effects. Still later on, Simon jumps on giant swinging chandeliers—once again, Mode 7 backgrounds, this time in rotation and translation across the screen.

Even with all these dazzling effects, fundamentally, Super Castlevania IV remains all about walking, jumping, whipping enemies, and collecting power-ups. Even the soundtrack reprises all the classic songs from the first three Famicom episodes. The game plays like the simpler 1986 Castlevania (and covers the same story of Simon Belmont’s quest to defeat Dracula in 1691) rather than picking up after the gameplay experiments that had been going on in Castlevania II: Simon’s Quest, which featured nonlinear trajectories through the game, an inventory system, and puzzles to solve. It may be considered as a remake of the original, at least to an extent, according to the game’s director Masahiro Ueno (Szczepaniak 2013). However much of a remake we consider it to be, it definitely lies on the conservative side of the innovation spectrum with incremental improvements rather than radical innovation.

Super Castlevania IV, along with Super Mario World, stands as perhaps the clearest example to demonstrate Nintendo’s 16-bit console’s stance on innovation. All this shiny new silverware had been designed to accommodate a number of same old familiar dishes. It was “back to basics…Super basics!” Nintendo would go even further down the path of reiteration by releasing a buffet of remakes (this time indisputably so): Super Mario All-Stars, a graphically and sonically revamped combination cartridge that let gamers play the NES Super Mario Bros. titles. As if we needed additional arguments that showed the Super Famicom to be, in the end, a “Super” version of the Famicom, a conservative console bent on providing the same game experiences with nicer graphics and sound.

Well, at least they didn’t call it Super Super Mario Bros.

4 Beyond Bits and Pixels: Inside the Technology