Retronauts - Retronauts Episode 398: The Super NES Launch

Episode Date: August 23, 2021

Jeremy Parish, Bob Mackey, Chris Kohler, and Stephan Reese muster all their Nintendo knowledge and an alarming amount of fuzzy nostalgia to talk about the 30th anniversary of the Nintendo Entertainment System launch and the console's early days. Art by Greg Melo; edits by Greg Leahy. Retronauts is made possible by listener support through Patreon! Support the show to enjoy ad-free early access, better audio quality, and great exclusive content. Learn more at http://www.patreon.com/retronauts

You're listening to Retronauts, a part of the Greenlit Podcast Network. To hear more great shows or to learn how you could become part of our consortium of independently owned podcasts, check out Greenlit Podcasts.com. This week in Retronauts, 30 plus 16 equals 398. Hi, everyone. Welcome to Retter Not's episode 398. I am Jeremy Parrish, and I am here this week to fill your ears with a talk about something that we've already talked about before. But we're going to do it anyway. We're going to do it again because that's how much we love you. And we love the Super Nintendo Entertainment System, which turns 30 years old this month, this month being August, the month that you are listening to this podcast in, not the month we are recording in. But, you know, we're going to just kind of time skip ahead in our brains. And it's great. The Super Nintendo Entertainment System launched 30 years ago this month. That's a long ass time. And here to discuss long asses with me, we have a panel of experts, including the star of Retronauts. Oh, is that me?

That's you, Bob. Okay. Yes, hey, it's Bob Mackey. I want to announce up front that as of the posting of this podcast, I have now been on Retronauts for 10 complete years. And my very first podcast for Retronauts was about the Super Nintendo. So officially, I am ready to start phoning it in. All right. Excellent.

Well, I will give you lots of opportunities to phone it in this episode. Excellent. I'm relying on my 20th anniversary notes that I wrote 10 years ago. And all the other features in crap I wrote around that time. Also, this episode, we have also hailing from the Bay Area, also a long-time contributor to the show. It's me, Chris Kohler, currently sitting on my front porch, plucking a banjo while a spaceship zooms over my head. A classic milieu. And finally, another Nintendo expert who has been on the show before, but not as often as Chris.

and that's okay because everyone's got to start somewhere. Please introduce yourself. Mode 7 Denier, Stefan Rees. How's it going? It is going okay because the Super Nintendo Entertainment System is 30 years old and that is an opportunity to talk about the Super Nintendo Entertainment System. We are not going to call it the SNES this episode and if anyone does that, they're going to get kicked from this call, just FYI.

But that's because we are civilized and sane people here and don't do bad things. What's your take on Super Ness? Have you heard that before? I don't like that either. Yeah. It was always Super Nintendo where, you know, around my friends growing up. There was, like, the Nintendo and there was the Super Nintendo. We said S&ES.

I don't really hear anyone say Super NES, Super Ness. S&S is what we said in my neck of the woods. That's very particular. Like, I appreciate the respect for the abbreviations, the periods. They're regional versions of this console name. Of course, for all our grandparents, it was still just the Nintendo. Yeah, or Atari. Yes. So the Super NES, as I mentioned, is 30 years old. And we have discussed the Super NES on Retronauts before. That episode 10 years ago does not count because we are not legally entitled to consider it among our ranks. I don't think. I don't know. It's corporate. Who cares? It's a chance for us to talk again. But, you know, I think there's always value in revisiting a topic and approaching it from a different angle. You know, I've really come to feel over the past few years that,

A mix of approaches is great for retronauts. You know, we, we do have the extremely in-depth historic retrospective episodes like the Street Fighter episodes we've been doing, which are, you know, very well researched, people coming in, bringing lots of knowledge and details and some personal passion. But, you know, sometimes just, you know, a more experiential conversation is good or a more sort of granular focus. And I'd like for this episode to be both experiences. and granular. I put out a call yesterday on social media for people to write letters, and boy, did

people write letters? We've got a whole lot of listener mailbag. So there's a lot of community feedback on their super NES memories, your super NES memories, I suppose if you're listening to this, and you wrote. And at the same time, I'd really like for us just to focus on the super NES launch, because the system evolved quite a bit over the five or so years that it was viable. on the American market, and I really feel like, you know, where it ended up was different than where it started out. There was definitely hype for the Super NES, but, you know, it was up against some strong competition. And it took a while for it to kind of demonstrate its direction and kind of the, the ambition that Nintendo had for the system. There were some really strong launch

games, but, you know, finding, like, what makes this different from the NES besides prettier graphics? Like, what is that? And so, you know, I kind of want to talk about. that period of uncertainty, those early days of, you know, hype and and seeing store kiosks and that sort of thing and being like, oh, Super Nintendo or SNS, if you are one of those people. So that's where we're going with this episode. So, didn't you just say that if you, if anybody said SNES, you'd get kicked from the call? Yeah, I'm saying, like, I am, that was my, that was my olive branch to them. I see.

That was me saying, like, I don't, I don't think you're a truly terrible person. You know, if you're one of those people who is excited about the SNES, that's fine. You just don't have to, you know, be public about it. Anyway, let me ask all of you. Like, at what point in the Super Nias lifetime, lifetime, lifespan, did you discover the system? Stefan, how about you? Ooh, I think the first time I saw it was at Price Club. I don't know if that's how regional price club is, but it was like a membership only, you know,

big box retailer slash grocery store, you know, where you go in and you spend, you know, $5,000 on like four packs of televisions, you know, one of those kinds of places. but yeah they had a they had a lineup of it was next to the genesis it was the all the kiosks were I can see it in my head altered beast running and then and then Super Mario World right next to it that was my first introduction there I had been gifted a Genesis because my grandmother was friends with a therapist from someone at Sega and I don't know who it was but that's all I knew so they they gave me a genesis that I didn't actually particularly want because I was so hyped on the

Super Nintendo, but we couldn't, well, my parents would not afford a Super Nintendo. They were one of the millions of parents that I think didn't see the value in upgrading from the NES to the Super Nintendo. So they wouldn't buy it for me. And so I rented mine over and over again from a little place in South Pasadena called Video Row. So if anybody ever finds a game with that rental sticker on it. I'm passionately hunting one. But but yeah, so I rented Super Mario World over and over

again until I probably could have bought a Super Nintendo with that rental money. But yeah, that was my introduction. So at launch, but yeah, just renting it over and over again. So it was both an opportunity for you to play cool video games and a lesson

in the evil of landlords. That's right. All right. Bob, what about you? Well, I knew about the Super Nintendo because I was an early EGM reader, like at the age of seven or eight, and I believe they had coverage of Super Mario World back when they called it Super Mario Brothers 4. So I was the king of the school bus showing people that right after Mario 3 came out in America, there is a Mario 4, and we just don't have it yet. And I don't think I was successfully indoctrinated enough by Nintendo because, for whatever reason,

and I think it was because of the price drop, instead of getting a Super Nintendo in 91, I got a Turbographic 16 right before the S&ES launch I think it was because it was it dropped to $80

and that was an easier sell on my parents and I was like oh they'd appreciate this deal and it comes with the Bonx Revenge

revenge so I got that but then I think I started noticing oh all the games I want are on Super Nintendo

this thing called Street Fighter 2 seems like the biggest deal in the universe and I should play it and so

for Christmas of 92 I got Super Nintendo and Street Fighter 2 that was the first fighting game I played, and that was pretty much the only fighting game I cared about for the rest of my life.

I can relate to that. And I will say also, what really worked on me was the store kiosks because, you know, they'd be at, like, J.C. Penny and Sears, every place was selling video games in some little compartment of the store, and just seeing the giant bullet bill in Mario World 1-1 was absolutely mind-blowing if you are eight or nine and had never seen something that big moving on. on a screen of a video game before in your life. I think that is what made me realize, oh, no, this is a really big deal.

This giant bullet, this thing with no animation frames, it's moving across the screen. And I think that is what made me think like, this is a big deal. All right. Chris, yeah. So, yes, very similarly to Bob. In 1990, Super Mario Bros. 3 comes out.

We're all blown away by Super Mario Bros. 3. And then a couple of months later, probably just in the summer of 1990. I'm at a store and I see this copy of Electronic Gaming Monthly, issue number 12 on the shelf. And it's like, it says, it's Ninja Guide in 2 is on the cover.

And but then it's also just like, oh, new information about Nintendo's new 16-bit SFX system. And so, you know, I flip this open and it's just like there's like one or two little blurry spy camera screenshots that they got of Super Mario Bros. 4

and that's the very early prototype where the leaf power up was still in it. Super, super weird. And of course, that wouldn't even come out for another six months, whatever, in Japan. But I saw that. I'm like, oh, my gosh, there's Super Mario Brothers 4. I just, you know, same thing.

Like, I just played Super Mario Bros. 3. And I'm like, wait a minute. You know, I was subscribing to Nintendo Power. They didn't say anything about this. They hadn't told me about this, but what else were they keeping from me? I was 10 years old at that point.

Just turned 10. It wrote to Nintendo. I wrote them a letter and like, hey, you know, are you guys going to release this 16-bit, you know, Super Mario Brothers 4 in America? You know, if not, you know, I actually very specifically

requested, I'm like, can you also make a version for the NES? You know, that's the same game you know, so we can play it? And they wrote back, and then I found out that Nintendo, as a lot of people have pointed out in the past, Nintendo would always write back to kids and send them a letter. And I remember, I still have the letter, so I don't know exactly, but I definitely remember that they were like, at the time, we have no plans to make a sequel to Super Mario Bros. 3, but we might, if enough fans like you, ask us for one.

So they completely lied in that letter. And then... And it's kind of victim blamey, right? A little bit. A little bit. Yeah. So finally, you know, obviously Nintendo Power finally copts to the fact that the Super Famicom exists and that they're going to, that they're of course going to release it in the U.S. So at that point, you know, now I'm subscribed to EGM and Nintendo Power to get all the information.

And we were very, my brother and I, who was, you know, by the time it came out, I was 11, he was 10. And we were very much like, oh, okay, how are we going to get this thing? Talk to our parents about it. It's like, guys, $200. Fortunately, my parents, you know, they, you know, that my dad was into computers. They had had an Atari 2,600. They understood in a way that, you know, I think a lot of other parents, unfortunately, didn't, unfortunately for the kids, that, you know, eventually there would come in time that you would have to upgrade

your video game console. They were like, yeah, okay, well, and then the way that it worked out, and this was super unfair, they were like, so I had all these, whenever I got my allowance, I would spend it immediately on a video game magazine. And then whenever my brother got his allowance, he would save it. So he had like, he had 50 bucks. So my parents were like, okay, we'll put in a hundred, Dan, my brother, you can put in your $50. And Chris, you can do housework to work off your $50 share of the whole thing. And, of course, I'm like, okay, that sounds great. Whereas my brother was like, wait, wait, I have to put in my money.

And Chris isn't going to put in any money. They assured him that it would work out somehow. I still think it was pretty unfair. But, yeah, so we got a Super Nintendo in, like, I don't want to say August, but we got a Super Nintendo in, I think we got it like in September. I think we got it in September 91, you know, very close to launch. you know, didn't really have very many games for it for a while, but played the hell out of Super Mario World, obviously.

Yeah. All right. You know, I actually don't know. I usually have such clear memories about these things, but I don't know the first time that I saw Super NES. It was just kind of, I feel like it was background radiation for me. Like, you know, I started reading magazines and it was just, there was rumbling there. It was just always being mentioned.

But, you know, I owned an NES and was, was pretty. heavily invested in that, so I kept buying NES games. I'm sure I saw store kiosks of the Super NES. I'm, you know, I definitely poured over the Nintendo power coverage of games like Super Castlevania 4. I had to play that

somehow. But yeah, I don't remember really doing much with the Super NES until summer of 1992 when I got my very first proper summer job. And I got a bank account and could write checks. And with my very

first paycheck. The very first check that I ever wrote was to best products for a super NES. And a month or two later, Street Fighter 2 came out and that became this kind of epic crusade around

town to find a place that actually had it in stock. But I do remember going to, I think I had lunch with friends at an Arby's of all places and there was a super system there. The super NES equivalent of the Play Choice 10.

And I remember us looking at it, and my friends were dismissive like, oh, it's Mario again, who cares? Whereas I was like, wow, that game is really good looking. Does your friends create advertisements for Sega? They might have. I don't know. Like, they were very jaded. Whereas I was like, that is a very large bullet that Mario was flying over. We were all taken in by the bullets.

Jeremy, I'm sorry. It's a big bullet. So the first time you played Super Mario World was in Arbys? I think it might have been of all the weird, like, bizarre places. But, you know, this was the hangover of the 80s. And, you know, people were still just shoving arcade machines into any space they could. Sure. The shine hadn't come off.

The idea of, hey, kids will come and drop quarters into this thing. And they will also buy meat sandwiches. so yeah it was an Arby's what the hell anyway yeah but you know I got the system with my very first paycheck and it was very satisfying but yeah I don't know it was it was kind of hard to find other people who were actually interested in it all all my friends you know a lot of us owned 80s but I was I was the guy with the super neas some of them bought genesiss some of them didn't buy anything. I did have one friend who bought a Superdeus, but, but, you know, there was a huge drop off. And then, you know, a few months later, everyone regretted it because here was

Street Fighter 2 and everyone wanted to play Street Fighter 2. So, like, they would just come over to my house and be like, hey, we're here to play Street Fighter 2. You know, it was actually like this very brief period. I think I might have mentioned this on the Super, the Street Fighter 2 episode of Retronauts from earlier this year. But there was a brief window where I was playing a lot of Street Fighter 2 at home and obviously they weren't so I would take this like to their house because they'd like bring over Street Fighter 2 and I would just dominate everyone that's like the only time in my life that I've ever like been top dog in a fighting game it went away pretty soon after that because you knew how to do the super yeah I was like yeah I've I've taught myself to

use this horribly in you know unsuited controller to to play Street Fighter 2 I understand like using shoulder triggers to perform, you know, some of the moves and things like that. I know what each character can do, whereas everyone else is like, whoa, Street Fighter, cool, wow, this is really different than the arcade. Its control is totally different, so. Street Fighter, too, was actually what got my parents to finally buy me the Super Nintendo because I was getting good in the arcades and I was getting into fights with other people, like other kids.

And so my parents, you know, when I, you know, mentioned that, They have a home version now, right? They immediately went out and bought me the Super Nintendo so that I, basically they were trying to get me to never go back to arcades again. Wow. Which didn't really work, but it did get me out of fights over Street Fighter, so I guess that's it. Okay. Well, then the money they saved on hospital bills alone. There you go.

You know, paid for it. Yeah. Yeah, so anyway, that's kind of where we all got started. So I actually was not really on hand for the Super NES launch because I didn't buy my system for nearly a year, like nine months after it's an American launch. So I missed out on that hot early period. But, you know, there wasn't much happening. A hot F0 action. Yeah, I mean, there was some good games for sure in the first year.

But, you know, I feel like the big stuff came out later, like Zelda and Street Fighter and, you know, Secret of Mana and manna, I guess they're calling it now. You know, all that stuff. Final Fantasy 2, which was actually 4, but we didn't know that. We thought it was the second one. SimCity. It was very exciting. That's what I wanted, SimCity, because we could not afford a computer and that was a computer game. Nice.

Yeah. Yeah, well, the first year of the Super Famicom was, I mean, I kind of looked over that recently and it's like, wow, very, very few games came out on that, on that console in Japan for the first 12 months. Yeah, it was a, it was a slow start, you know, kind of Nintendo 64-ish almost. Yeah, not that bad. Right. But much slower than, you know, certainly we expect these days.

I mean, by the end of 1991, more than 30 games had. shipped in the US. And it took nearly, you know, the first year for that many to ship for Super Famicom. Right. Yeah. So it was lucky. I mean, you know, basically when the Super NES came out, that they had a year's worth of Japanese releases to, uh, kind of put out a launch. Exactly. So one of the reasons I wanted to put together this episode is because I've done a lot of research and reading about the Super NES over the past, I don't know, like basically this year to, put together my first volume of Super NES works as a book. I filled that thing with all kinds of supplemental content.

And one of the things that I did, I was really curious about, was kind of reconstructing the timeline of how the system was introduced to the world. And fortunately, Chris Covell, a friend of the show and a good guy all around, has on his website, which is just his name, Chris Covell, he has just a ton of scans of old magazines not particularly like Japanese magazines not particularly focused on any one thing or another

just you know video game related so I picked through his archives and found every mention that I could kind of in the chronology there of the super NES and you know between that and some other sources the super NES was actually being teased as early as September of 1987, which I think, if you look back, makes sense because what was happening around September

of 1987 in Japan, Hudson was gearing up for the launch of the PC engine. We, you know, we tend to think of the turbographics, the PC engine, as being a 1989 system in the U.S. But that thing launched in Japan when the NES market in America was still just kind of finding its feet. You know, the NES didn't really, I would say, take off until, like, become totally dominant until 1988, 1989. But, you know, by that point, the, the, the Famicom market was like four or five years old. And it was kind of looking long in the tooth. They'd already created an expansion for it.

And, you know, competition was kind of starting to heat up. In a, or Hudson was coming out with their competing system. Sega had the Mega Drive on the horizon. So, yeah, I feel like this was kind of their counter programming. Like the, the Famicom market was still hot in 87, but at the same time, they were looking at the competition and saying, well, you know, you may want to hold off on buying that Hudson system because the Nintendo family computer that you love is going to be growing up and getting an upgrade. So that was in a, not a game magazine, actually. It was in, I think, the Daily Shimbun newspaper. And so it was just like a news article.

But the first appearance of the super family computer came almost a year later in a profile in Touch Magazine. I don't know anything about Touch Magazine. I'm guessing it's not a DS Games magazine since this was August 1988. But they had some pretty accurate information about the system in that magazine, but also some really wild illustrations that look nothing like the individual system. Have you seen, I think I've seen, like, the early mock-ups of the super family computer that they came up with in some of these magazines. They're quite interesting. Were they, like, official mock-ups or, like, were they just people guessing? No, it was, it was magazine staff just being like, we had an artist draw what we think the family computer's successor is going to look like.

This racing stripe is rather sharp. Based on nothing. Yeah. Yeah, the very first rendering of a super family computer, it's basically shaped like the Famicom. It's got the little slots for you to put controllers in, but the controllers are rounded now. They've got, they're wireless.

They've got little, like, remote wireless transmitters on them. There's big buttons and, like, weird slots and stuff. They went kind of wild there. Anyway, so, yeah, beyond that, Nintendo didn't actually show the Super Famicom until November of 1988. They offered the press their first demo. In December of that year, Famitsu magazine had a big blowout, probably based on the press demo. That was probably, my guess, from what I can tell, it was the first kind of public showing,

you know, of real meaningful information about the Super Famicom in Famicom magazine. And then the system was actually shown off at SpaceWorld in July of 1989. And I'm guessing that's probably where a lot of the kind of like spy camera photos that you saw in magazines were coming from. That or maybe like some press event, they had one in January of 1988 where they showed off the actual specs of the system and showed off the pilot wings Dragonfly demo back when it was called Dragonfly. So, yeah, I think, you know, some of these early showings were where info started to leak out. But, you know, there was nearly nearly a year and a half between the first public showing of the Super Famicom and its actual launch in November of 1990. And then Nintendo to Power didn't actually show off the console, you know, acknowledge its existence, basically, until their May 91 issue, just a few months before the systems launch. And that's when they were like, hey, look, here's the console.

we've got this cool purple design. It's going to be great. So I think they wanted, I think Nintendo wanted the actual American case design to be finalized before, you know, acknowledging it and announcing it. So I'm guessing that's why you didn't see any mentions really of Super Famicom and Nintendo Power.

No shots of the hardware that I was able to find. You know, it's possible I'm missing something. And Stefan, that's why I have you here, because you are the Nintendo Power expert. Sure. No, I think you're right. And one of the things that I think is funny is that, even in that, that's volume 24, it's the Vice Project Doom cover.

And there's like no, there's no mention at all. Like, it's just like no, like in the glossary on the cover, there's really nothing about the super Famicom. They're talking about like, hey, the bonus battle toads comic, right? Like that's the big, the big thing that, you know, they're big bonus. So like even like they just don't, they just glossed right over it in that issue. And I mean, I wasn't even. I'd mentioned last time I was on here, my first issue of Nintendo Power was volume 28, which was the Super Mario World issue, which was the first time that I think I probably was

aware of the console. But yeah, that even directly from the source, it was a very slow trickle. Even when they decided to start rolling it out, it was super, super under the radar. So the system actually launched here in August of 1991, as mentioned before, and shipped with four or five games, there's a little bit of argument online about whether or not Gratius 3 was available on day one. But if not, it was available a few days later, so I don't know that it really matters that much because release dates in America were so slippery back then anyway.

Some people, I think someone recently showed off a receipt. I think it might have been Shane Benhousen. I think showed off a receipt of having actually purchased the Super NES like two days before its official launch date. So, you know, stuff got into inventory

and stores were just like, yep, let's sell it. Let's, you know, get our money back. Well, I mean, there was no official launch date. The launch date was like eventually landed upon by people doing research and trying to figure out when the first one's hit. But then that didn't even mean it was available across the entire country. I was looking into this when the Super NES's 25th anniversary happened.

And I think I remember finding like newspaper articles or announcements from Nintendo in September of 91 saying, okay, we can now confirm that the Super NES is now available, you know, throughout the United States of America, no matter where you are. So it was definitely a gradual rollout territory by territory. And yeah, because there was no release state, the release state of video games having not been a concept that had been invented yet when a store got it, they just put it on the shelf. Yeah, I really want to know when release state started being policed because I remember as late as the late 90s getting things at least the week before release date. Even big games like Final Fantasy 7 and 8, I'd get five or six days before the defined release date in magazines and on commercial. Yeah, it wasn't, well, yeah, it, it, things by like Nintendo 64, you know, Battle Fantasy

7 around late 90s, that's when everything started to have a release date, but it wasn't, they didn't police it, as you said. They didn't actually stop you from selling it if you got it before that. Yes, the, oh, go ahead. No, I was just going to say, I think that, like, consciously, and I'm sure it was before this, but consciously, like, the, the first street date that I think I was aware of as far as, like, talking about people breaking street date was like the the Xbox 360 launch with like cameo I think like when when copy started to get get that game like as far as like hey

this is the street date and if you break it you're in trouble like that level of policing like I think I think I think 360 was the first time that yeah that 360 is when I started I feel like I started seeing shipping boxes and things like that with like release you do not put this on the shelf until such and such a date yeah yeah Concrete release dates were definitely a thing, beginning with the 32-bit generation. You know, Sega had their amazing Saturn launch of today. And Sony was like, we have a hard firm date. Nintendo did the same thing with N64, but I definitely got my N64 a few days before the official date because Toys R.S called me and we're like, hey, you've got a reservation.

We got the system. Come get it. Well, again, nobody was policing it and nobody had, nobody had any sense that they should hold on to it. They got it in. They're like, okay, we'll sell it. Like there was no culture of only selling it at a certain date. But I've never heard of anyone breaking street date on Dreamcast. That 9-999 date was just so fixed and firm.

I was very online already at that point and very kind of tuned in to message boards and, you know, gaming sites and everything. And I don't remember seeing anyone say like, whoa, it's September 5th. And I have my Dreamcast. It was, you know, straight up, like, go to the store on September 9th. There it is. Yeah, that's true. And that was very clearly communicated. And, yeah, and that's right.

And I would have heard had people gotten it, had gotten it early and known about it. But, yeah, that was also my first, that was like, definitely my first experience of, like, going, you know, showing up when the store opened on September 9th with my pre-order in hand, standing in a little line full of people and buying it and ding it back. Yeah. But, yeah, with the Super Nintendo, it was, when we're talking about their, release date of the Super Nintendo. It's not, and that's why when it's like, oh, was Gradius 3 in stores, you know, on that exact date? It's like, maybe, but who cares? It didn't

really affect anybody. And, you know, the other thing is that, like, to, this always happens when we talk about the launch of a system, because, like, it happens with, like, the GameCube, and it's just like, oh, the GameCube had one of the worst launches ever because it had, you know, it only had Luigi's Mansion and Wave Race and Super Monkey Ball, and therefore it was one of the worst launches ever. I'm like, yeah, but you bought a GameCube, and like, within two weeks, you had Pickman and Super Smash Bros. Melee, which were two of the greatest games of that entire generation, and they were there within two weeks after you bought the system. So, like, to look at the day one games, it doesn't actually give an accurate picture as to what it was

like to be an early adopter, because to be a GameCube early adopter was actually phenomenal because you had these two incredible games to play right in that, you know, very short window, And with the super NES, it was very much the same thing because by Christmas, essentially, you know, there were quite a few games and some of which were, you turn out to be very, very good. Yeah, exactly. And that's, you know, I think the world has kind of come around to that realization. And now people talk about launch windows as opposed to launch dates. And there was a lot of ridicule when I, you know, the term launch window first started being bandied around. But really, it makes a lot of sense because, yeah, there.

are some people who buy their system on day one, but hey, I still haven't been able to buy a PlayStation 5 and we're a little past the launch window. So, you know, there's always supply constraints and really it's that first like six months or so that people, you know, that's, that's kind of the early adopter period. And yeah, like, you know, the temperature of their excitement is important and does kind of drive interest and talk about a platform. But does it really Like, yeah, by the end of 1991, you know, within five months of the system's launch, it had 30 games, which included not only, you know, Mario and Sim City and F0 that came at launch, but also things like, you know, UN Squadron, Act Razor, Final Fantasy 2, there's like ghouls and ghost games, if you're into that, you know, Castlevania, I don't know if I mentioned that before, super off-road, and of course, combat basketball starring Bill Lane Beer. So it really had something for everyone. Bill Ambier would not return my emails when I worked at One Up.

I wanted to interview him. It was really disappointing. Yeah. I was excited about that one. I'm laughing because Nintendo Power did a huge spread on Bill Ambir's basketball that included all the behind the scenes like mocap that he apparently did or whatever, wearing the suit. Wait, what?

Really? Mocap for that? Or like he took, you know, they took, they did, I don't know if it was like traditional. mocap but they did um they definitely had him in the suit and that you know doing that's that's really strange because that game is just straight up a rip off of speedball two for the amiga and there's nothing there's nothing about that game which is a like a purely top down sports game not like you know a top downish kind of Zelda viewpoint but like literally top down where you see like you know people's bald spots um and everyone moves very robotically so i don't i don't know what that's

I wonder if they just needed a photo reference for the cover. The artist could just not imagine Bill Lambier wearing that. He had to see it in front of him. That's entirely possible. Or, like, this was, you know, they had to photograph him to digitize his image for the game, like the title screen. I don't know. But there's nothing about that game that actually has to do with Bill Lambeer after you get past the title screen. It's straight up a rip off of an Amiga game, you know, with these identical-looking robot people.

on an arena like you know if it didn't say if it didn't have the character the license name on there there's no reason to think oh yeah this one robot guy that's bill yeah it was really the magazine often would they had very strange choices as to what they would focus on in an issue like well like earlier we're talking about how they just sort of floated the the super famicom uh without any mention of it or um the first when they did uh final fantasy three the big blowout in final Fantasy 3, illusion of Gaia was on the cover and it was just like, what? Well, that was a Nintendo

published game. It even came with a t-shirt so clearly that's the heavy hitter here. What was the better deal? Yeah, right, yeah, for sure. Yeah. So anyway, yeah, I mean, we can talk a little bit about the, you know, some of the basics of the super NES, but, you know, when we look at the specs, I tried to put some comparisons in the notes, you know, to kind of give an idea of how the raw numbers of the system compared to what it was competing against, you know, the NES, the Genesis, the PC engine. And, and, you know, don't, don't be mistaken here. The super NES was competing against the NES for quite a while. Chris, you shared an article that you wrote five years ago. I don't know if you want to kind of read. litigate that, but it was a very, you know, made a very good point that was definitely something that I experienced. Oh, that, um, that, that parents, uh, believed that the Super Nintendo was a scam, right?

That essentially, that not, not simply that like, oh, you know, you just bought a new game system. We can't afford another one. But literally that Nintendo was running a scam because they should just make all of their games for the platform that already. exist and essentially there's there's there's like no reason for nintendo to have to sell you a new piece of hardware you have a perfectly functional one that the only reason they would be doing this is to squeeze another two hundred dollars out of the players to you know before they'll allow

them to play the the new games so it wasn't even a question of this isn't you know we don't we don't feel the upgrade is worth it or we just bought you this one it was really a question of like this isn't even necessary and the only reason they would do this is to scam people And, I mean, I think that, you know, it's important to realize this was, it was like the first console transition, essentially, because when Atari brought out the Atari 5200, they didn't say, you know, okay, we're now we're bringing out the Atari 5200. So if you want to play, you know, Space Invaders 2, you have to get this. 5200 came out and it was just all, it was like just better versions of all the same games that were on the 2,600. kept making all of those exacts. They just did different variations of the games for the 5,200, or 2,600.

So it was just sort of like, oh, well, you could do this if you want to, but we're still going to support this one. But with Nintendo, they were kind of like, well, yeah, we'll still do games, you know, for the NES, which they did for a little while. But it was like, but if you want to play the new Mario, well, you have to get this. Yeah. Yeah. Excuse my ignorance, Chris, but was the Atari platforms back then, were they backwards compatible?

Because I know that was a really big thing. By buying into the scam part, right? The 5200 wasn't backwards compatible, but there was an adapter that they sold that did let you use your 2,600 games because they think they realized. But the 5200 obviously was this like complete boondoggle of a piece of garbage that was like, let's take our Atari 8-bit computers and like hastily refit it into a shell. and it made no sense. But also, let's not make it actually compatible with the 8-50 shooters. Right, yeah. It was just done in a very cheap way.

But they and then they were like, okay, well, let's essentially build this quote-unquote adapter that's literally a 2,600 that you plug into the 5200 and then it's compatible. And then with the 7800, it was backward compatible. And I think that Atari was right. Like it's the backwards compatibility. I think it helps people. psychologically like make that transfer because one of the things that my my friend and my best friend in middle school at the time was told by his parents was that you have too much invested

into your your original Nintendo and they really looked at that big library of games as this investment and that they they wouldn't and so that might have actually helped them If he were to say, no, no, no, mom, I'll still be able to play all these games on the new Super Nintendo. That actually might have helped. But unfortunately, they wanted people to stop. And today, we totally accept this. Oh, I mean, everybody understands his parents. Everybody's like, oh, yeah, well, eventually the PlayStation 4, we're going to stop making games for it, which I mean, I assume they eventually will.

And then you'll have to buy a PlayStation 5. But at the time, it was just not understood why you would have to even do that. Like, what do you mean you can't make more games for the Nintendo? Of course you could. Just put all the games on the original Nintendo. Why couldn't you do that? Yeah, there was speculation in the Japanese press that, you know, spread into the U.S. press that the Super NES would be backward compatible or have like an external adapter that

Nintendo showed off. It was this kind of weird setup they have. But because the Super NES was based around the same, you know, like an advanced version of the same architecture that the NES ran on, there was some expectations. that there would be compatibility. And, you know, to your point, Chris, Sega had actually made the generational transition with Master System to Genesis.

Not that Master System was any great shakes in the U.S. Or in Japan, for that matter. But, you know, it did have some mindshare. I knew people who owned it. They enjoyed it. They were proud of it. And they jumped over to Sega Genesis right away. There was an adapter that would allow you to play

Master System games on Genesis. and it was just a pass-through adapter. All it did was just like, you know, adapt the shape of the cartridge pretty much. Yeah. Because the way Sega evolved its architecture was to keep what had come before in there serving some function and then enhance some other portion.

So the SG-1000 processor was in the master system, but the master system had a way, way, way better graphical processor. Yeah. And then the Genesis used the master system chip as I want to say like the not the sound chip it was like an an IO controller or something it was in there somehow so basically that allowed Sega to just

kind of say oh well yeah you know for the 10 of you who bought 3D Zaxon or whatever we here you go here's your power base adapter and you can play that game on Genesis not that you're going to want to because these games are all way cooler

but you know it's there as kind of a SOP so you know I do think that Nintendo did kind of undermine its chances in the U.S. early on, where people are so budget-minded and economical and frugal compared to Japan, you know, I think they kind of missed a little bit there by not offering any sort of backward compatibility, which, you know, it does seem like it would have been potentially possible to, you know, even with an adapter or something, to make that happen. I mean, they gave us a Game Boy.

adapter, which was literally just a Game Boy in a cartridge that would just, you know, play output video through your Super NES port. So, yeah. And it was, it was Japan, you know, Japan really was still at the, at the tail end of the, of the bubble economy, essentially, where people were just like, give me more expensive things to spend my money on. I wanted to say that I was lucky enough to have a video game savvy stepdad. In fact, I visited home recently, and I think he has a better gaming PC than I do right now.

and he understood it but I think Nintendo they anticipated this and I think they were very savvy about giving you basically the sales pitch that you would give to your parents I didn't need it

but I remember when I got the Super Nintendo Players Guide in the mail part of like a set of four really nice players guides you got if you signed up for Nintendo Power the first 20 pages were just saying well here's why

the Super Nintendo is different calling out like different chips calling out mode 7 transparencies the size of the games are bigger. It was just saying, yes, this is different and here's why. This is not just us trying to scam you. This is a legitimately new piece of hardware that is more powerful and you will need it to run these prettier, larger games that sound better and are more complex. And I definitely absolutely just bought into all of that. You know what I mean?

I just learned everything I could about why the Super Nintendo was so much better than the Nintendo and how it let you do translucency effects and you know, real, real semi-transparencies and you know, background sprite scaling and then would just tell every adult, not even just my parents, just literally everyone

that I encountered. Spend enough time with me and I will just start talking at you about how great the Super Nintendo was going to be and why. Well, it was also important. I mean, you know, even if you didn't need to put together a PowerPoint presentation for your parents, I mean, this was the the console wars was a thing.

Right. And so you needed to be equipped with that information, not just for your parents, but for your friends on the playground. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, 100%. To this day. And as soon as those adults started to tune out, I told them that one day there would be this thing called podcasting. And I'd be able to do this and people would actually listen to me. Yeah. To this day, I know the amount of on-screen colors in a Super Nintendo game compared to a Genesis game compared to a Nintendo game just for console war's sake. Yeah, I would say this is the first Yeah, I would say this is the first platform really. that turned kids into tech nerds who know about specs who can tell you about

the capabilities of the different graphical modes and you know all those all those kind of arcane details that previously had not been an issue it was like plug-in cartridge play game oh game doesn't work blowing cartridge plug-in cartridge play game there we go this you know there was there was a greater degree

of media savvy and of course Sega fans love to throw in Nintendo fans face the fact that the Genesis processor was more than twice as fast as the Super NES processor. And, of course, Super NES kids would be like, yes, but wait, check out this graphical processor that can produce up to 32,000 colors and display 256 at a time, as opposed to your system. They can only do 64. What do you say about that?

So, yes, real ammunition for the console wars. Did Super Nintendo have like a... Because obviously blast processing was like the catchy thing for Genesis. Was there like a, I mean, there was mode seven, but like was there like a catchy thing to throw back? I don't remember there. Yeah, there were enhancement chips. You know, the NES had mapper chips, which basically expanded the memory capacity and storage capacity and, you know, gave games the ability to like split their screen and have, you know, parallel scrolling and things like that. Whereas the Super NES didn't have the mappers.

Instead, it just was like, we have the ability to slap another computer onto the bus of this system through the cartridge. And, you know, it started simple with pilot wings and the DSP1 chip that helped with math calculations. But it got way up there. Like, I think the craziest never came to the U.S. It was a Shogi game used by Seta in Japan. And it included an arm processor that was like, you know, basically the GBA chip, but two generations before that. And it's basically a high performance risk computer in a super Famicom cartridge. It's sold for like $150 because people really love their shogi.

Because they wanted to really get their ass kicked at Shogi. Absolutely. Like that machine must have been diabolical. But, you know, if you play, if you play that and compare it. it to the chess master, which shipped on just like a standard, you know, low, low memory ROM for the Super NES. You know,

if you put it in like professional mode, it can take like 10 minutes for the computer to make a move. So, you know, that was understandable. But you also have the Super FX chip and the FX2, which were, you know, basically primitive polygon manipulators allowing flat shaded polygons

to be rendered it up to 10 frames per second on screen. The X2 chip had more capability. more power. The crazy thing about that, which, you know, we actually heard from Dylan Cuthbert on an episode of Retronauts several years ago was that the technology for the Mario chip, the Super FX chip, came along, like it came about before the system launched. And there was some discussion like, do we want to put this into the hardware? But this discussion happened late enough that the architecture was pretty much set. And they were like, we can't delay this

just to like make the system more powerful and also more expensive. So it should be just, you know, something that we add on. But how different would the Super Nias Library have been if the system could have handled like janky primitive 3D from the beginning? Like all the, the beautiful pixel art we love so much. So many developers would have been like, oh, that's old news. Let's go 3D. And the Super Nias Library would be like some beautiful pixel art and a whole lot of shit. Well, we know that Nintendo wanted to make Mario 3 a first person game or an isometric game, something like that.

they really wanted early on to move into 3D polygons. But I'm glad they didn't. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, yeah. So, yeah, that's true. I mean, if the Super Nintendo had been this rudimentary 3D machine. Yeah, you're right. I mean, we'd have seen a lot more of it. I think what's so important here, you know, that you mentioned is that, you know, the, the mappers for the Famicom and NES for like an afterthought, right?

I mean, the system was designed to do certain things, just run those N-ROM games. And then it was like, oh, hey, we could do this. We could do that. Well, I mean, the system was designed to be extensible. Like, Uymora knew that what they were producing in 1983 was not going to last that long. So he consciously built the system with the ability to have that extensibility, which not every system does. Right. But with the super Famicom, it was like, not only are we, we're not just going to sort of put some hooks in there.

it's like it was really designed with the idea that this was actually going to happen quite a bit. And, you know, especially just the fact that the DSP 1 was included in Pilot Wings. I mean, that was a day one game. You'd figure that they would have included the DSP 1 in with the hardware. But no, the idea really was, we're going to make it very easy to design these special chips and we're only going to put them in the games that absolutely need them. But we're going to do it from day one. I know someone's going to be pedantic about this and write to us and be snarky.

So I will just say Pilot Wings was actually shipped about a month after the Super Famicom launch in Japan, okay? Oh, oh. So I did not realize that. Unfortunately, you can reserve your tweet now. People make, people make comments before they're done listening. That's true. And then they look even worse.

But, but yeah, you're right. No, like, it was with, you know, the DSP shipping a month after the comment. console. Clearly, that's not something they, like, cobbled together at the last second. We're like, oh, what if we did this? Okay, get it out really fast. It was in the works for a long time. I mean, that was the game they showed off the system with Dragonfly, you know, became pilot wings. Of course, it also put... The FX chip existed before the Famicom hardware launched. Like, clearly, yeah, you're absolutely right. There were plans in the work. Like, there were, there were expectations that this system would grow and evolve through hardware. It was also the classic, uh, The classic move of like, we're going to start off third-party software developers on the back foot because, because, of course, Nintendo could much more easily and cheaply, you know, put these chips into their games and still sell them for lower prices. While if a third, so now if a third-party software maker wanted to make their games look as good as first-party games, oh, well, you're going to have to buy these DSP chips from us. You're going to make your own chips or whatever. And even, even, you know, discounting development cost of all that, it's going to make your cost of goods higher and your retail price higher.

So we're going to beat you there, too. So it was sort of the classic, you know, Nintendo benefiting Nintendo. I can tell you work in publishing now, Chris, because you just said cost of goods. Uh-oh. Because I talk like that now, too. What's the ROI on this? Yeah, exactly. Yeah, but, but, no, that's, that's, that's,

completely true. And a few years ago, there was an episode where I interviewed Rebecca Heinemann, who was the programmer on RPM Racing. And she talked pretty extensively and not kindly about how, yeah, exactly what you said, about how developers got off on the back foot. Like, in order to get this game out during the launch window, it was one of the few American developed games to ship in 1991 for Super NES. They basically had to to get the Super Famicom and reverse engineer it. And, like, she taught herself to read basic Japanese, technical Japanese in the space of a couple of weeks in order to, like, read through the manuals and, like, find the

capabilities of the system that Nintendo didn't actually, you know, hadn't told its American partners about so that she could put together this game that RPM racing is weird, actually. I don't know if you've played it. but it's the only super NES game that runs entirely in the high resolution mode. It had one, one of the modes was dedicated to high resolution, double resolution, like 512 pixels, you know, horizontal resolution as opposed to 256. And that was mostly used for menu screens and RPGs like Secret of Mana. But this entire game runs in high resolution mode.

But the thing about the high resolution mode is that it just, absolutely demolishes the number of colors the system can display it once. So it has this really weird look to it that doesn't look like a console game. It looks like a PC game, especially with the buttons and stuff in the menus. But it's got this weird flickering and like screen tearing that you don't see in any other game. But the publisher just insisted like, hey, you've got to do this high resolution mode thing. And it really worked against the game. So, you know, when they, when they sat down to do the sequel, they said, let's not do that.

Let's just make this the best racing game we can. And that was rock and roll racing, which is, in fact, one of the greatest racing games of all time. Available in Blizzard Arcade Collection. Thank you. I was waiting. Available now. A nice layout. For all major platforms.

Thank you. Absolutely. Yeah, but yeah. And so is RPM racing, actually, if you want to check that out. Yeah. It's in there. It's novel. It's different.

It certainly is a historical curio because, like I said, it's the only Super NES game that runs entirely in that mode as opposed to just like switching into it from time to time. But if you look over this initial lineup of games for 1991, it is, it's all over the place. I mean, there's, you know, the really good stuff. But then there's strange stuff like Drachan, an open world RPG from Europe produced for Super NES by Kempko. So it was like filtered through the lens of Japanese game design and aesthetics, but not really.

It's still pretty much. much like got that kind of inexplicable European open world RPG design, like you're walking around and then all of a sudden a giant cat pops out of the ground and kills you, shoots laser eyes at you. First game to make me cry for the record. Was it the cat or was it because you were touched by the story of the dragon prince? No, it was just that I rented it and it was just, I just had, the combination of being brutally difficult and like I had no idea what I was doing, that that's not a good combination

for a kid. Yeah, you've got, you know, stuff like chessmaster. You've got the sequel to Tennis for NES, which was not actually made by Nintendo. It's actually a Tosey, I think, Tonkin House game, but Nintendo liked it so much, they were like, this is it. This is the sequel to Tennis for NES. It's super tennis. Yeah, I mean, definitely, certainly at that time, it was kind of on the first party publisher

to release a game for every month. major sport, right, for their, for their platform. So that we, I think we saw pretty much everything covered by Nintendo at some point pretty early on for Super NES. Yeah, I mean, you've got John Madden football. You've got two baseball games. You've got two golf games. You've got technically a basketball game, but not really. Bill Ambier, what are you doing? I think all that's missing is soccer and hockey this first year. Yeah. Well, I mean, so definitely, you know, I think when you look at sports, it's like, okay, here's an opportunity to, you know, somebody's an early adopter or they're going to need a basketball game. So let's be the only basketball game that they could buy, the only tennis game they

could buy. Not the only golf game because there were a couple of them. But then also a lot of a lot of shooters in this first batch of games. Yeah, not really leading with the best foot forward, honestly, for the system. A lot of these early games suffer from severe slowdown. And I've read, that's because the developers were programming in C plus like they were programming in kind of a high level language and then that had to be interpreted back

into Super NES machine code and then you know later once they got a handle on the hardware then they just programmed in assembly language but yeah those early games from third parties Gradius 3 final fight super ghouls and ghosts they're they're pretty rough to play these days

although you know what is his name Viter Vitella Vitilella, I can't remember exactly what his name is, but there's a hacker who has gone in and reworked a lot of these old slowdown laden games for the SA1 chip, which was very advanced, like the most powerful common mapper that eventually would show up, you know, a lot of the best games would show up on SA1 chips. And like if you play Gradius 3 on an SA1 chip where it does not have slowdown, it is, it's the kind of thing that makes you question your life. It's so hard. There's just bullets and ships flying everywhere, and you're like, how is this supposed to be possible? Well, it's not, right? They took into account the slowdown. Yeah.

Well, I mean, the arcade game is just like that without. Oh, okay. So it's just a notoriously hateful game, honestly. Right. Yeah, I mean, as a person who didn't really play a lot of side-scrolling shooters at the time, which, again, like, there must have been some other, like, I'm guessing that, you know, that, that genre. Genre was very, very popular in arcades. Finally, if you had a 16-bit system, that meant that you could play games that looked like arcade games.

So we see a lot of essentially scrolling shooters because if you're an early adopter, you're probably a little bit older. That's probably more your speed, more your genre. I don't know. But there sure were a lot of them. But I didn't want them. I wanted Final Fight. That's the only game that I asked for for Christmas.

We got the Super Nintendo, you know, late that summer. And then my Christmas list was, I mean, one of the things was just like, I want Final Fight. That's what I want because I love to play in that in the arcade. Were you happy with the home port of Final Fight? Yeah, like not entirely. I understood that like it really should be two-player. And then it should be able to play as guy. You should be able to play as guy.

But, you know, I still played the ever-loving crap out of it. I really liked it. I mean, it's got great. It had really nice graphics. It has awesome music. It's still fun It's just that You know, it was just single player

It's okay I mean, I played alone a lot I was all right with that Okay, fair and all Yeah, in terms of shooters Surprisingly, I found that Darias twin Is the best playing shooter from this era Because it's very plain looking

But I think because it's so simplistic looking Relative to most super NES games at this time It looks more like a PC engine game Which isn't a bad thing It's just it doesn't have the depth And color variety that you saw in a lot of Super NES games. It looks more like, you know, from a previous platform.

But because of that, I think it really, like, it moves at a great speed. There's never any slowdown. There's a lot happening on screen, but it doesn't feel overwhelming. It's, you know, a really well-done port. But there's a lot of really interesting experimental stuff in these early days of the Super NES. One of my favorites is Hyperzone from Hal, which, like, I didn't know what this was going into it, but it's basically like F0 meets fantasy zone

in a sandwich. The sandwich being, you know, the F0 mode 7 effect, the ground scrolling beneath you at high speeds. This uses some sort of mirroring effect. So you're flying kind of like not through a tunnel because it's flat, but you're flying through like

a between two sheets of outer space or something, rocks, cities, I don't know. But they're, you know, they're above you and below you, and you're flying through the middle. And what's really interesting about this game, it does a lot of, like,

it has these weird little grace notes. So, like, between every other stage or so, your pilot gets out of his little ship and gets into a different ship that has a different design. And then when you get into that new ship, the game's heads-up display, like the interface design, changes to match the style of the ship you've gotten into. It's really, it's just like someone put a lot of

care and thought into this game that was, you know, largely overlooked by most people and is largely forgotten. But there was, there was some real love and devotion given to such a, a tiny little insignificant detail, like just this aesthetic detail of the game that has no impact on how it plays. But it's, it's neat that they did this. And then also, clearly they were still trying to figure things out with the hardware and what the super NES was going to be because there is a code to unlock a 3D mode for like it's not a the anisotropic 3D, it's the shutter style 3D. Like there were no there were no shutter glasses released for the Super Famicom

but there was you know that the Super the Famicom 3D system released in Japan that used that style. So I think Hal was kind of banking on the fact that the Super Famicom, the Super NES would see the same sort of peripherals and add-ons that the previous system had. So they were like, hey, let's future-proof this and put some actual 3D into it, which has absolutely no use. I don't know of any way to be able to make use of Hyperzone's 3-D mode because you can't

plug 3D glasses into the super. And yes, because they don't exist. But it's there. And they were just like, hey, let's just add this. And maybe this will be useful someday. Kind of like the save features in ExciteBike for the track editor, which, you know, the peripheral roles to use that never came out in the U.S., but they left it in there anyway, just in case. Well, my favorite weirdo launch game is definitely SimCity, and it's not the ideal version of

this game, but I think it's interesting in that the Sega Genesis, the main pitch for that was, you know, bring the arcade home and it launches with an arcade game in America, Altered Beast. This, they were giving you a PC gaming experience, and especially in 1991, that was a luxury because PCs would not drop sharply in price until the mid to late 90s, this my family got one, But in 1991, a PC was probably around $2,000. And to me, a 10-year-old, I'm like, well, $2,000 might as well be $1 million. We will never, a PC will never enter our home. I will never play all of these games I'm drooling over at the PC game store.

But this was giving you that experience in a much less expensive format and with a lot more character. And we were talking about how the Super NES was chugging a lot on some of these early games. SimCity, it also did that to the point where when you loaded a city, if it was too big. It would take about a minute for everything to start working correctly. And I think it was written into the lore of the game. Like, oh, it takes your city about a minute to wake up when you load your game. So I think they included that in the instruction book. Like, why don't I have power when I load my city? It's like, well, you know, it's got to wake up just like you do in the morning. Now, don't ask any more questions. Yeah, I think you're absolutely right. One of the over or the, yeah,

the overlooked facets, I think, of the early Super NES is that it does try to give people computer games style experiences. If you look over the launch list, you know, the first year list, it's, you've got SimCity, obviously, as you mentioned, but Dracan was a computer game. The chess master was a computer game. Populus.

There's a populace game on a conversion of populace from computers, I think Amiga to Super Nias. I asked Peter Molino once about it. He was like, oh, you played that. That's the worst version. I love that version. I think it's actually pretty good.

and it's got a little city made of, you know, Famicombs and Famicom discs and that sort of thing. It's great. Let's see. John Madden Football computer port. Wiley Computer Club, a computer port. Yeah, Lagoon is a computer port. So they were really like kind of

embracing this like computer to console conversion process much more so than you saw, you know, at a higher frequency with other consoles. And something Rebecca Heinenman mentioned when I interviewed her was that she really liked programming for

the super NES because the processor was the same that appeared in her favorite system to program for of all time, the Apple 2GS. So, you know, there was this kind of like commonality between an existing home computer line

and the super NES. So it's, yeah, just kind of an interesting little footnote. I think, you know, the super NES would define its own style. of game in 1992-93 and do its own thing. But there was a while where I was kind of like, hey, we've got all these different experiences. Let's see what we can make work on this platform.

And I will say that PC to console conversions were a lot more convincing on Super NES than they had been on the original Nintendo and Entertainment system. I was just looking over this list to just kind of find things that stuck out and actually one of my favorite games on the console of all time is on this list and that's Act Razor. As we were talking about a minute ago

with SimCity, that game really scratched my SimCity itch but as well layered a competent platformer on top of action platformer on top of it. Yes, please. That game is so near and dear to my heart and they went and they ruined it with the second game, but whatever. But yeah, Actraiser is just an absolutely phenomenal game. And so ahead of its time and I think sticks out head and shoulders above a lot of these games. Yeah, I think a thing that really makes Actraiser work is that it's not just simulation plus action. What really glues it together is that it takes a

lot of notes from role-playing games and like the storyline, the quest, the kind of the the gameplay loop, the cycle is very heavily informed by RPGs. And, you know, it also helps that Quintet's writers, the developer, really love to get down into sort of a little bit of navel gazing and really, you know, not in a bad way, though, but like to talk about morality and to focus on the lives of the people who inhabit their universe. Like, if you look at all of their games that are, you know, story-driven, this and illusion of Gaia, soulblazer, terra-nigma, like all those games, they're not afraid to like kind of slow things down or to question morality or to question mortality.

They were a really unique and special studio, and it's a shame that we lost them for whatever reason they went away. But, you know, their works were just unique. And Act Razor, I think, came out strong. You know, one of Yuzo Koshiro's few scores for the platform kind of gave this, like, bombastic John Williams sort of score. But it just, it brings all these elements together really effectively. And even though the platforming can be pretty tough, you know, it does have the RPG element. so you can continue boosting your strength to a certain degree. And then, you know, the rest of the time you're doing the simulation management, but there's their story and there are characters to kind of be involved in the lives of

even though you don't interact with them directly. Just, yeah, it's a really unique game. And really, that was one that I rented several times back in the day because it was just so kind of unexpected and everything worked together so well. It was really good. Yeah, I can't. Oh, go on. I was just going to say, I think it was the first time that I felt.

like I cared about more than just the main character and not just like, oh, yeah, I care because I like Mario, but like genuinely cared to the things that are happening in this community that I'm building, right? And they actually put faces and names on these people. It wasn't just like, oh, this is your amorphous city like in Sim City. It's like, no, like you saved this kid's life and this is his name. And, you know, and what is his name anyway? I don't, I don't recall. But also the ending was also the first time that I felt genuinely rewarded. And I think that was also the first time that, like, I really realized, like, how much more depth, uh, the platform could offer me than, than the NES. Like, like, with that I was consciously aware of like, okay, yes, this can actually, like, give me a bigger experience. Um, because that act razor ending is, what, like, 10 minutes of them just, like,

going, going back and like, telling you everything that happened to every single person that you talk to, including Teddy. That was the kid's name. Teddy. Teddy. So, yeah, I hear so much about Teddy. Yes. Yeah, they give you the final Teddy update.

I can't tell you, like, I, I, I loved Act Razor. And I got it, I don't know if I got it that first Christmas because I, I think I actually may have because I had asked for Final Fight, and I think that, like, our video store was, like, selling an extra copy of Act Razor for very cheap, like a, like a, like a, one that had been rented. I don't know why they were selling it so cheaply, but I think I actually got Act Razor that first 91 Christmas, too. And if it wasn't, it was a year later. But boy, like, I was not yet an RPG person that would come very shortly after. But like, because I didn't want, I did not ask for Final Fantasy 2 that first Christmas because I had played Final

Fantasy 1 and was like, I don't like this. So why would I like Final Fantasy 2? But Actraiser looked interesting and uh i i mean i was really terrible at games as a you know as a young uh kid so and i very impatient uh but i did beat act razor which means that it was it could not have been uh that difficult or if you keep throwing yourself at those levels you would eventually i think do it but wow yeah it it did it did um but i think this the fact that you could just try it again and again and didn't really have to worry about like running out of continues or whatever was like, you know, eventually you'd get it. But who, like, what an amazing.

I mean, first of all, that was the game where, you know, you played Super Mario World. And obviously, Super Mario World is not going to try to, like, blow you away with graphics and sound. You know what I mean? It's more sort of a sedate kind of game. Chris, that bullet. It was so big. The bullet.

The bullet. Everything was a huge bullet. But Act Razor, I mean, that was the first game where he popped. And the Final Fight was cool. But, man, Act Razor, you pressed the power button on. on ActRacer, and in the first five seconds, it was just, it just blew your shit away with the John Williams-esque intro and the logo spinning in dramatically from the back, and then the logo pops on screen and it's like, da-da-da, you know, and, oh, man, I mean,

Act Razor was, that really, really was like one of those early Super Nintendo games that, like, made me so excited tone that system. And yes, you know, Yusokoshiro's music and I think his mastery of those, I mean, that act razor was like, that was the first game where I don't know if I, you know, did that thing where we all did where we kind of tried to rig up a tape player to like capture the music from the Super Nintendo via like a microphone or whatever. But I, I think Actraiser was one of the first games where I was really thinking I wanted to try to do that or maybe tried to do that because that music was so good. And you know what? also happened with the act raiser music is that

you know, Square was working on Final Fantasy 2 and Way Matsu heard Uzakosiro's music and was like, oh crap, this is way better from a, not necessarily from a melodic perspective, from a

sampling perspective, they really have some great samples in here and it's making us look bad. And they actually went and they redid the samples for the Final Fantasy soundtrack after he heard Actraiser, because they realized

that he had actually done a, that Kosciro had kind of had won up them. I was just thinking, I think that the actorizer might have been the first time that a game gave me like a genuine moment of anxiety on that, like that. I think it might be actually Mode 7, but where they, the

crash down from like the castle or from, from your cloud into the dungeon. Like, and it's like the da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da. Like, I was just like, oh, God, oh, God, oh, God, oh, God. Yeah, yeah, the, yes, the use of the mode seven, which we had not really seen a lot of, the really dramatic use of mode seven and effects like that. The really dramatic use of the great soundtrack really did create many of those moments in Actraiser, for sure.

Yeah, it was a great use of tech. And between Actraiser and Final Fantasy 2, and, you know, it's not the same genre, Super Mario World, there were, from the very beginning, these three games that were just immense sort of long-term commitments, you know, if you wanted to complete Super Mario World and unlock, you know, all 96 doors and, you know, complete Act Razor and max out your town and be professional mode where you didn't have the Sim elements. It was just ActRaser 2, basically. And, you know, get all the way through Final Fantasy 2, which, you know, was very confusing because of the extremely weird translation.

Yeah, like that was that was a lot of substance for this system. And that's not even, you know, looking at just the kind of pure arcade-style action games like Super Castlevania Four, Super Goals and Ghosts. UN Squadron was another great one. Yeah, it was just a really, really strong launch, in my opinion. You know, looking beyond that first initial wave of five games, like by the end of 1991, that was that was 30 games that is and you know there are some duds in there for sure but you know even the duds are kind of interesting like the first licensed game for

super nes what could it be could it be an american cartoon could it be could it be home alone no it's ultraman what but then home alone shortly thereafter sadly yes again they i mean man they probably made a but ton of money just being able to have that game out. It is better than Home Alone, too, the game. I'll say that at least. All right. Yeah, looking over this RPM racing, John Madden football, and Home Alone,

I think those might be, maybe Chess Master are the only ones, the only games on here on this entire list developed in the West rather than by, you know, even the American PC games and stuff or conversions of American title. were mostly done by Japanese studios. So some good, some bad. It's the facts of life. You take the good and the bad. With a purposeful grimace and a terrible smile, join Nikki and Wyatt

as we stomp our way through the history of Toho's Dai Kaiju films in Discuss All Monsters. Are you telling me we're going to discuss all monsters? We won't stop until there isn't a monster left to discuss. Smash that play button like Godzilla and King Kong smash an 18th century Japanese pagoda. Only on the Greenlit Podcast Network. Video Deathloop is a podcast where we watch a short video clip on Loop until we just can't take it anymore. Along the way, we'll try our best to make each other laugh and to hold out longer than the other guy. You can jump in on any episode, no need to worry about continuity.

Check out Video Deathloop on the Greenlit Podcast Network with new episodes every Friday. Anyway, um, we're kind of, running low on time. We're almost at an hour and a half here. So maybe we're not going to read these letters this episode. I'm building up a bit of a mailbag backlog. So I think I'm going to have to take a rain check on most of these letters. Maybe we'll read a few just to make it so people don't feel like they totally squandered their time. But we'll be catching up with a mailbag from all the episodes that actually ran too long to incorporate the mailbag into. Before we go there, though, would you guys like to share any more thoughts or memories or, you know, just say anything else about the Super N.S?

It sounds like a wake or something, which is not my intention. It's a birthday celebration. I definitely never felt like, you know, Super NES, you know, sometimes you buy something at launch and then there's sort of the doldrums where nothing much is really coming out for it. I never felt that with the Super NES. I mean, every single, you know, from launch until basically. until the N-64 came out. I mean, that thing, there was always a new game to play. You know, he rented tons of stuff on it.

And then, you know, just looking at the whole lifespan, you know, it's funny because, like, the Super Nintendo evolved in so many ways over that, just that short span of time, you know? Like, there's that first era. Then, you know, the release of Star Fox with the Super FX chip doing things that you would never expect it to do, you know, the tail end, the, the, the, the, the, the, the S.A. one ship games, you know, and even games that didn't have the S.A. one ship, it just looked so beautiful. It's, it's, Donkey Kong country, everything like that. I mean, it was just,

um, every, every year with the Super Nintendo, you know, there was something new, groundbreaking, different, and really just, like, changing what you thought, uh, a, you know, super nintendo video game even even was or could be yeah i'll say that the super nintendo uh it was basically a lie from when i was nine until i was 14 and those are just very crucial years of your brain development so yeah i became not just a fan of video games but someone who scrutinized them wanted to learn everything about them and then by the time i got to the end of super nintendo i was worried like oh no do i have to stop liking video games now it turns out no you can just keep liking them forever and it's fine but there was some anxiety at the end there but yeah like my brain

was the most on fire during this time and some of my favorite games are on this platform and of that era too so yes i've uh i love it i'm glad we're doing another episode about it yeah i think for me again i mentioned this one we're talking about act raiser but just in general the superintendo was the first time where i went from playing a game and going oh yeah this is a fun thing to do to genuinely caring about what I was doing and getting those experience. And this is when I became an RPG lever with like, you know,

chronotrigger, earthbound, illusion of Gaia. Those are, you know, probably my top three, if not my absolute top three of all time. And so the Super Nintendo finally gave me the experiences that I wanted that allowed me to care about what I was doing. And, you know,

I've been a set collector for a lot of years and I recently sold off almost all my games to kind of reinvest of what I'm doing with the Nintendo Power Art and the Super Nintendo site is essentially all that I kept. So I'm very near and dear to my heart and I think nine of the top 10 games off the top of my head of all time for me are on this platform.

So yeah, I love it. I'm glad I'm here. Yeah, Bob, to what you said about realizing, oh, I don't have to stop liking these games The super NES fell for me because I'm old between, you know, it was in high school for me into college. And when I first went off to college, I didn't take my super NES with me. I left it at home. I was like, this is, you know, why would I take this?

That's pointless. I've outgrown this. And, you know, I went back home at the end of the first semester and Secret of Mano was out. And it seemed interesting. So I rented it. And then that's basically what I did that Christmas. break was just rent that game over and over again and play all the way until I finished it. And I realized like, you know what? This thing is actually awesome. I actually really like

video games and it's stupid for me to say, oh, I'm too old for these because I'm not. This is a fun, good experience and it's, you know, something I want to take with me. So I took my system back and that was when I was doomed to be a nerd forever. So it's all because of the super and yes. We all chose our path in this life. exactly. So before we wrap up, I do want to read just a couple of letters, just to, you know, say thank you to everyone who wrote in. I promise we will get to the rest of these. At some point, got to find a slot in the schedule. But it'll happen. So from Dustin, being a Nintendo family, back in the day, we first saw mention of the upcoming. Super NES, actually S-NES in Nintendo Power. I remember first seeing the actual console in the display case at Toys R Us.

It was not accessible to play. We could only stare at the Super Mario World Loop on the screen behind the glass. Now that he mentions it, that's actually the first time I ever saw Super NES games, was in those horrible Toys RS kiosk that you couldn't play. Hated those things. Eventually, the local Kmart had one set up in the electronics section that I would play when my parents shopped around. Being 11 at the time, $199 seemed like a million. I had some money saved up, but nowhere near enough. We put a console in layaway, and what seemed like forever

later, we brought the unit home. The Super NES is probably my favorite console. Thinking about how we got one is a big hit of nostalgia. Here's one from, actually, they didn't leave a name. leading up to Christmas 1991 when I was 11 years old so kind of getting a theme here going I started to see the television commercial for Super Mario World airing on cable stations I remember setting up our family VCR

to try and catch a recording of the commercial because I wanted to watch it over and over again and take in every exciting detail possible I did and I spent days or weeks analyzing the short clips of all the different areas the overall world map the Cape Powerup all the colors and commentary. I was beyond taken, and I took this information to school to excitedly share with classmates and made

sure to take every opportunity to tell Santa that I really, really wanted this for Christmas. I remember my parents putting my brother and I to bed late on Christmas Eve and getting up so early to open the presents under the tree. I didn't expect that we would be gifted to Super Nintendo, but boy, did I want one more than anything, and I was overjoyed to get one along with F-Zero, which I didn't ask for but enjoyed intensely. With help from friends and Nintendo power, I devoured Super Mario World and proudly finished the 96 epits exits before January was out. I recall we rented SimCity in Pilot Wings as well, soon after we got the system, both of which I again devoured. In Pilot Wings, I relished going for high points in the lessons, and in SimCity, I remember packing a city to the brim and laying inless rail to get the Megalopolis population of 500,000.

Like many kids during this generation, Super NES game rentals became an important and beloved weekly family tradition. Being so impressionable at this age, I saw no flaws in these game experiences. They were pure joy at the time, and I still take nostalgic pleasure in them. Interestingly, it's probably the music that is stuck with me most. All the Super NES launch titles have deeply memorable soundtracks, Gradius 3 included, although I didn't play that at the time. To this day, I'm still discovering this platform. I'm grateful to own an analog supern T and have access to a library of fan translations,

ROM hacks, and original releases I overlooked in the 90s. For example, last night I played Gunman's Proof for the first. first time in English. Marvelous, another Treasure Island, is a delightful game I'm grateful to also have recently discovered. Tonight I'm watching SGDQ's Super Metroid Run, reminded of when I saw the link to the past Super Metroid randomizer run, which was a fantastic, fascinating way to see the games played. All of these new engaging experiences born from an unforgettable discovery in 1991 that I never would have expected to endure after 30 years. All right, so yeah, the The super NES definitely packs a nostalgic punch for many people, including ourselves.

All of us were at somewhat different points in our lives and had different experiences getting a hold of the Super NES, but it definitely stuck with us and helped shape the horrible, horrible people that we are today. So we have super NES to think for that. And I think there's more than nostalgia. I mean, of course, all the guys in the nostalgia podcast always want to say, oh, it's not just nostalgia. But, you know, it was essentially, it was basically kind of an evolutionary dead end, right, because it was this, because they didn't build the Super FX chip into it, and because Nintendo actually did make that decision to cancel Star Fox 2 and not do, you know, not go 3D, you know, past those games. It was the ultimate, uh, 2D gaming platform. And, you know, I mean, obviously we stuck with the talking about the launch here, but, you know, you can't make a game like, Final Fantasy 6 or Chrono Trigger or Terranigma

like those games that really define the platform they're still the pinnacle of that particular style, that particular form because everybody after the Super Nintendo moved on to 3D moved on to polygons

and that really changed. It changed how the games were even designed in the first place. And so to play, it's very different experience to play Final Fantasy 6 versus Final Fantasy 7, which at its heart is, you know, it feels it's

slower, it's, you know, a little bit more deliberate of a game. It just doesn't feel like playing a 16-bits role-playing game. So really, what you have with the Super Nintendo is this absolutely gorgeous, really highly playable group

that, you know, in many ways, modern day games never really got better than that in that sort of narrow band of experiences well and so many modern day games now are still trying to emulate those experiences right like to your point right that that that goes to show that we haven't you know that that may be the pinnacle right because everyone is is trying to all all the especially in the indie community like all of those games are trying to get back there right rather than trying to evolve from there

All right. So that wraps it up for our Super NES podcast. So I think we'll take this opportunity to thank you for listening and supporting retronauts. And I would be remiss if I failed to mention the fact that that you can support Retronauts through Patreon, patreon.com slash Retronauts. If you sign up, you can listen to episodes a week early every week, every Monday, and a higher bitrate quality, no promotions and advertisements and so forth.

And for $5 a month, you also get, oh gosh, you get patron exclusive episodes every other Friday. You get weekend columns and mini podcasts by Diamond Fight. And you also get Discord access. So it's really kind of a smorgasbord of cool things for supporting the show. And, of course, Retronauts can be found on, you know, other places where you listen to podcasts and on the Greenland Podcast Network and so on and so forth. It's highly available. And I recommend you listen to more episodes if you enjoyed this one, because many of them

are as good as or even better than this episode. I'm not going to say which. I'm not going to, I don't want to play favorites. But there's some good ones out. there. This one was a very good one also. I think so. Thank you, everyone, for bringing your enthusiasm to this episode and your memories and

your knowledge. Let's do the roundtable so everyone can talk about themselves and where we can find their work, because everyone's up to their ears and cool stuff. Stefan, how about you? Sure. You can find me on Twitter at Art of NP, Art of Nintendo Power. You can also just kind of Google Art of Nintendo Power. you'll usually find me.

I just, just, so new, in fact, that I wrote down the name of my own organization, so I didn't forget it when I talked about it. But I just launched a 501c3 nonprofit around a video game art, particularly doing essentially a mobile museum called the Interactive Art Collection. So Art of Nintendo Power now is going to be an exhibit of the interactive art collection. So that's a really exciting thing. I'm going to be showing up at conventions near you doing pop-up museums, showing actual physical art from the golden era of video games. It's exciting.

Yeah, thank you. I'm also a third of the Collectors Quest podcast. You can find us on SoundCloud is probably the easiest way to find that. If you want to hear me talk more about kind of the grittier collecting aspect of games, complaining about sealed graded games. etc, etc. You can find me there. I'm also on Instagram, Art of Nintendo Power, with underscores between all of that. And yeah, that's where I'm hanging out. All right, Chris. Well, I just sold my sealed copy of Super Mario $1.5 million, so I don't do anything anymore. No, I wish. Please get more to our Patreon, Chris. At least $1,000 a month. If you need a tax break, I'm a

501c3. I don't know if I mentioned it. Well, I don't need a tax break. I don't know. to tax break because it's a money laundering scale. Oh, I see. Right. Okay. So, hello, I'm Chris Kohler. As you may know, I now I'm over at a digital eclipse, the video game developer. We put out Blizzard Arcade collection

earlier in the year. And then we also did Space Jam, a new legacy, the video game, which has, I recommend everybody check it out if you have an Xbox because it is free for everybody who owns an Xbox. And

it's a I would say Final Fight style but this actually does have three player multiplayer support unlike the Super Nintendo version of Final Fight. Would you consider this a combat basketball game? Yeah so I

I don't think we ever called it a basket brawler but yes there's a it is a side scrolling arcade style throwback to the 1990s in which you punch people Punch robots, excuse me, in the face. But then there's also a basketball that you can pass around between the characters

and use the basketball for superpowered attacks. It is a short, free game. It'll take you about an hour to go through it on normal mode, but it's fun and I think pretty funny. And that is a thing that I worked a little bit on. And more games in the future. Please look forward to it. All right.

And Bob. Hey, everybody. You probably know this, but I have other podcasts going on. Those are Talking Simpsons, the chronological exploration of the Simpsons. And what a cartoon where we look at a different cartoon from a different series every week. You can find those wherever you find podcasts or go to patreon.com slash Talking Simpsons. Sign up there for early access and lots of bonus podcasts behind that paywall. We've covered things like The Critic and Futurama and King of the Hill and Mission Hill in separate mini-series for patrons.

So check it out. That is at patreon.com slash Talking Simpsons. And finally you can find me, Jeremy Parrish, on Twitter as GameSpite. That's my main social media presence, making dad jokes all day long. But you can also find me doing stuff here on Retronauts every week, just about every week. Let's see, what else? Oh, right, Limited Run Games. I work there. And also I have a YouTube channel where I've been going through the chronology of various game systems. I've covered the games we discussed, the period of Super NES history we discussed this episode to bring it all together. That is now a book

that you can buy through limited run games, their new press imprint, which has that, and also the Virtual Boy Works book that I put together with a great deal of assistance from Chris Kohler. So how about that? Everything is just full circle.

It feels so good. Just like a big hug of, a group hug of video game stuff. But yeah, the Virtual Boy Works and Super NES Works Volume 1 are both on sale at limited run games now, and they come in special editions that will be available for pre-order

or just order, I guess, I don't know, through the end of August. So go check those out. They're books that I poured a lot of work into, a lot of money into, and I'm very excited by how they come out. They've turned out,

they're so good. I'm really, really happy with them. And looking forward to more books down the road with NES works. And Sega guidance. Yes, I talk about Sega games. We don't hate it here. We still like Sega, even though we talked about Super Nies. The console wars are over, okay? It's fine. Go home. Put down your guns. It's fine. You don't have to be the lone

Japanese soldier living on the island in the 1980s, who doesn't realize World War II has ended. It's okay. It's okay. We're all friends now. Sonic and Mario are on the same team at the Olympics. What more can you ask war? Well, that's, I mean, yeah, that's over, but it's actually, it's the British people that are going to come for you now, Jeremy, because you're outlawing them being able to say SNES. Yeah. You know, amongst many other retronauts-related crimes against the United Kingdom for which we are still paid. Some international incidents are worth it. All right.

So, violating the Geneva Convention Daily, it's Retronauts. Thanks for listening. Go play some Super Nintendo games, not SNS. I'm going to be able to be a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit. Thank you.