The game the console manufacturers are fighting is the same old battle that other companies fought at the start of the Internet, of a walled garden over open access. In the end, in my opinion, it is inevitable that the open world will kill the closed one. (Nicholas Lovell, cited in Chatfield 2011)
The Super NES’s life may seem to have ended shortly after the release of the Nintendo 64, at least in the marketing practices and North American video game industry. Nintendo of America stopped shipping SNES cartridges in 1997 after a last batch of 14 games. 1998 saw the return of Frogger, with few changes from the 1981 original—a fitting conclusion to a console all about reiteration, and that was it. Nintendo tried to prolong its newly minted 16-bit victor in 1997 with a new, smaller, and cheaper SNES, the SNES 2 (or technically known as the SNS-101 model). The system was meant for the laggards (Moore 2014), people who for various reasons would not make the move to the 32- or 64-bit generation or who had missed out on the SNES. Japan would also see the revised system in 1998, this time called the Super Famicom Jr.
In Japan, Nintendo repeated the Famicom Disk Writer experience with a 16-bit “Nintendo Power” cartridge, a rewritable Super Famicom flash cart that could host any game that did not require an expansion chip (admittedly, quite a restriction). The service launched in 1997 and might have been Nintendo’s attempt at stirring its own revolution in distribution to match Sony’s CD-ROM upheaval; a rewritable cartridge eliminated stocks, distributors, wholesalers, and everything. The Nintendo Power system helped the Super Famicom remain remarkably active in its late life, with 28 games produced for the Japanese market in 1997 (compared with America’s 14), 18 in 1998, 19 in 1999 (to be fair, 8 of them being in the Picross series), and a final release in 2000 with Metal Slader Glory: Director’s Cut—the same year Sony released the PlayStation 2, to put things in perspective.
The other key Japanese peripheral was the Satellaview, launched in 1995 and discontinued in 2000. It fit underneath the SFC thanks to the expansion port and integrated satellite communications and download into a daily schedule of gaming. Digital magazines could be read, games could be downloaded, and, perhaps curiously by modern standards, games could be played through broadcast during certain time periods that became special events or a regular “gaming programming” schedule. The Satellaview was Nintendo’s integrated proposition to answer the multimedia and networking paradigms that were taking the computing and video gaming world, all the while retaining its absolute control.
The youth of today and tomorrow may not get to experience the Super NES as people did in the 1990s. Even if some of them might get their hands on a functional SNES and cartridges, they will be playing the games with at least 25 more years’ worth of games in their thumbs and behind their eyes. Most of them will play SNES games in emulators such as SNES9X or ZSNES, content with the various ad hoc modifications that these emulators use to support certain games that use nonstandard programming routines and tricks of the original hardware—notably, the work that was done in expansion chips. (byuu 2011, 1) Few of them will probably see the point in choosing higan, an emulator by byuu first known as bsnes that strives for cycle-accurate emulation at the cost of considerably higher computing requirements. Nevertheless, byuu’s dedication to the integral, hardware-specific ideal is commendable, and his research into reverse-engineering low-level quirks in the SNES’s functioning is helping the technically oriented get a firmer grasp on the system’s unique affordances.
Still, more young gamers will probably be playing enhanced remakes of “old” SNES games or perhaps their spiritual successors, homages to the Queen of 16 bits by talented game developers who were influenced by the console. The rise of independent or “indie” games in the mid 2000s, thanks to digital distribution and the democratization of game development tools, resulted in a number of titles that fall into this category. Axiom Verge and Cave Story pushed the 2-D platformer action-adventures of the Metroid and Castlevania series, whereas Scott Pilgrim vs. the World: The Game evoked the beat-them-alls of the 1990s (starting with River City Ransom on the NES). All of these games offer a curious assemblage of retro aesthetics: The music and sound uses chip sounds and techniques from the 1980s, but the graphics are done in 16-bit SNES style and color palettes. Other games such as Terraria and Stardew Valley have picked up the visual style of the SNES without the 8-bit sounds.
Beyond specific indie games, the SNES’s graphics left behind a stylistic legacy that has reached widespread representation and acceptance. In 2011–2012, the Grand Palais museum of Paris hosted an exhibition on the history of video games, whose visual identity revolved around a picture of the Grand Palais’s surroundings populated by game characters from various eras. They were all rendered as sprites on an isometric background, with a color palette that evoked the SNES. The exhibition’s curators proposed a periodization of video game history in the accompanying book and described the 1983–1990 period with the keyword “pixel,” whereas the 1990–1995 period is designated as “pixel art” (Clais, Alves, and Dubois 2011). This periodization is congruent with the main thesis we explored in the book: that the Super NES was a refinement, an iterative enhancement of what the NES offered. It brought pixels to the status of art form.
Beyond the legacy it left, the Super NES persists and lives on. In 2016, Square-Enix published a remastered version of its Super Famicom game Romancing SaGa 2 for mobile platforms, making it available in English for the first time, 23 years after its original Japanese release. In 2013, a game was published for the long-thought-dead console: Nightmare Busters (Arcade Zone 2013), a game that had been developed in 1994 and got shelved when publishing was canceled. It finally found its way, and design-wise it plays like a time capsule from 1994. (Kohler 2014) Super Fighter Team, the publisher, was also joined by Piko Interactive, a developer and publisher of games for older systems that has published or acquired multiple games since its founding in 2013.
The homebrew scene has a role to play in this as well. The practice of ROM hacking is one way by which gamers extend the life of classic Super NES games by developing fan translations for Japanese games and alternate versions of games with different levels, gameplay possibilities, graphics overhauls, or even full-blown new adventures. The portal romhacking.net currently lists 22 hacks for The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, 96 for Super Metroid, and 150 for Super Mario World. Zelda3: Parallel Worlds provides a complete new adventure, one that proved too challenging to many gamers. This spurred PuzzleDude to develop a hack of the hack, Zelda 3: Parallel Remodel, which preserves the essence of the hacked Zelda but lowers the difficulty.
Even more interesting cases of hybrid, ghostly extensions keep popping up. byuu’s higan emulator features support for an expansion chip, the Media Streaming Unit (MSU1), which allows the Super NES to access data of up to 4 GB in size. Essentially, it functions as a bridge to receive the data that would normally, according to plan, be sent to the SNES through Sony’s SNES-CD. Matthias Dagler (d4s) has created a Super Road Blaster ROM, a port of Road Blaster (Road Avenger on the Sega CD) for byuu’s MSU-1-equipped virtual SNES. In July 2016, possible worlds, parallel worlds, and alternate realities converged into Super Boss Gaiden, a homebrew game that was released for the SNES and the SNES-CD. Although currently only one person in the world owns an SNES-CD, a game exists that is compatible and operational on the prototype for a platform that never existed. Or has it not existed, in the eyes of spoony bards and thanks to Nintendo’s super power, even if the silverware was nowhere to be seen?
This book may have been about the “dark side” of the Super NES and Nintendo, but as I wrote at the beginning, there’s no arguing with the SNES’s lasting appeal and ongoing esteem. Nothing in this book will change that, and I plan to continue enjoying the SNES games that I have known for 20-some years now. If anything, the Super NES shows us that, although we may always look forward to new, original ideas, we may overvalue innovation as a criterion of historical relevance. Certainly academics and typical video game historians are prone to value “firstness” above all else, whereas gamers and sometimes game reviewers may appreciate the umpteenth iteration in a series or genre.1 This discrepancy might form a rift between the ongoing historical accounts and research and the past practices and current appreciation of the gaming heritage across a wide spectrum of gamers. In time, this rift might feed back into a misinformation echo chamber of its own (Therrien and Picard 2014), as academics and historians bring the “firsts” into the spotlight and devalue reiterations, although they may be more representative of the gaming practices of the period. Although I have consistently minimized the innovative aspects of the SNES and its games library in this book and showed how in almost every case its innovations came from some other prior art, this should be no reason to ignore the impact these various reiterations have had.
The SNES also alludes to ethical questions of obsolescence and supersession, in line with the work of James Newman (2012). In answering the ever-forward push toward more, new, never-before-seen experiences, we might overlook and indeed stifle the possibilities to reach deeper into already treaded waters. In a paradoxical reversal of Nintendo’s surface-and-core duality at the end of this book, a platform owner bent on reiteration and a platform made of conservative technology, exclusionary marketing policies, and enforcing a homogenizing culture may end up favoring the in-depth exploration of certain design ideas and experiences.
Call it a triumph of human creativity over corporate business if you will. Through the various forms of its afterlife, gamers, homebrewers, hackers, and next-generation game developers are collectively exploring the creative affordances that had been left latent in the SNES, finally free from the chains of marketing constraints—free from Nintendo’s Super Power. It is as if the SNES encouraged us to dwell in 2-D, challenging (but not impossibly so), relatively short or bite-size game experiences. For a while longer, perhaps, to reach further along the ideas and aesthetics of the late 1980s and early 1990s, and to bring them to perfection, instead of skipping ahead and surfing along the surface of constantly shifting ludic proposals in a search for golden ages that glitter and fade as new dawns break.
In the end, silver is stronger, and it’s up to all of us spoony bards to keep its shine. That may be our own Super Power.