Not only did the SNES sell over 49 million units, but it became home to some of the most iconic, enjoyable, and influential video games of all time. It’s a system we all know very, very well. But do you really know everything about the Super Nintendo? Some of you maniacs do, but even you might be surprised by some of these weird facts about one of the most beloved consoles ever.
1 Mario Kart’s F-Zero Origins
Without F-Zero, we wouldn’t have Mario Kart, which originally came from attempts at developing a multiplayer F-Zero. But thanks to Mario Kart, we may never get another F-Zero.
And that’s not just cynicism talking. F-Zero artist and Captain Falcon designer Takaya Imamura recently suggested in an interview that given the cost of a new F-Zero game, and considering how ridiculously lucrative the Mario Kart franchise continues to be, another F-Zero release just doesn’t seem to be in the works. “I think it’s because Mario Kart is Nintendo’s most popular racing game, and a new F-Zero would cost a fortune,” he said.
What makes this unfortunate news simultaneously interesting is the fact that Mario Kart wouldn’t have existed if not for the desire to take F-Zero’s lightning fast speeds and complex, futuristic courses to a multiplayer setting. This prototype didn’t yield such a game, but it was the groundwork for what would eventually be Super Mario Kart. Released in the summer of 1992, Super Mario Kart began one of Nintendo’s longest running and most beloved franchises.
2. The SNES Cabinet
The arcade industry was still very prominent in the 80s and 90s, despite home consoles becoming increasingly more relevant, and Nintendo opted to hedge their bets by releasing arcade cabinets that could play their best games. Even as the NES became a staple in tens of millions of homes around the world, Nintendo maintained their decades-old ties to the arcade industry. For the Super Nintendo in particular, that came in the form of the Nintendo Super System in 1991.
The Nintendo Super System would sell very poorly, which is probably why you’ve never even heard of it. Estimates place the figure at around 1,200, which is considerably lower than the 32,000 PlayChoice-10 cabinets, Nintendo’s NES arcade releases, the company moved in the years prior. If you were lucky enough to come across one, some of the SNES titles available included Super Mario World, F-Zero, Contra III: The Alien Wars, and of *course* the classic The Addams Family.
This SNES cabinet was the final arcade system that Nintendo ever manufactured and distributed themselves, and is about as hard to find as you might expect, especially in good working order. Also, it’s as big as a refrigerator. But you don’t need to eat, right?
3. A Direct Response to Sega’s Genesis
Nintendo was initially in no hurry to update the NES. Even with competitors like Sega and NEC’s TurboGrafx16 planning bigger, stronger consoles, Nintendo was confident the NES would maintain strong sales as an integral part of the family home. However, while the TurboGrafx-16 wasn’t a significant threat, with the marked superiority of the Genesis to the creaky NES, particularly with games that blew Nintendo away from a production value standpoint, Sega began to put a dent in Nintendo’s dominance.
It also helped Sega that they would launch the Genesis with an aggressive advertising campaign that went to Nintendo directly. A response became inevitable, and development of the Super Famicom was announced in late 1987 but wouldn’t see a release until 1990 in Japan. By the time the SNES was released in the US and UK in 1991 and 1992 respectively, the Sega Genesis had been out for nearly two years in most major markets.
4. Backwards Compatibility Almost Happened
Originally, the SNES was going to include full backwards compatibility with the NES library. While you may not care either way personally, backwards compatible game consoles can at the very least make playing old favorites a whole lot easier. Unfortunately, with the exception of the Nintendo Wii and Wii U, Nintendo has never expressed much of an interest in this feature, or their consoles were just too different from each other for it to make sense.
They went from carts to tiny discs to big discs and then back to carts. Make your mind up, guys.
But at one point, likely as a response to both Sega and PC-Engine offering backwards compatibility with their consoles, Nintendo only abandoned their efforts when they realized that adding it would significantly raise the retail costs. It’s too bad, but it’s also true that it would have made the SNES pricier, which just wasn’t viable as the battle with Sega was just starting to heat up.
5. PilotWings With a Side of Childhood Trauma
A child uses the power of his imagination to try and escape from a brutal, violent, alcoholic stepfather. This is the main plot of the 1992 fantasy-drama film Radio Flyer, and this almost became yet another licensed game in the 16-bit era.
Radio Flyer, from what little we know of the game, would have seemingly been in the vein of a Pilotwings sort of game. Meaning you would be responsible for expertly maneuvering and landing your vehicle to…get away from the abusive stepfather? How in god’s name was this even going to work?
We’ll never know. Either because someone actually realized that a video game based on a movie with such a harrowing topic was a fundamentally bad idea, or because the Richard Donner-helmed movie starring Elijah Wood bombed and bombed badly at the box office. Regardless of the actual reason, it was for the best.
6. HyperZone’s Hidden 3D Mode
If you haven’t played HyperZone before, you’re in for a good time if you like rail shooters. You’ll also have a lot of fun with the game’s hidden 3D mode, which even some of those who have played it before didn’t know about.
Developed by HAL Laboratory in 1991 as one of their earliest SNES releases, HyperZone is an extremely addictive, highly underrated rail shooter game whose Mode 7 graphics make you feel like you’re playing a shooter spinoff of F-Zero.
Across eight frenetic levels, buried inside HyperZone is fascinating support for stereophonic 3D. The cheat code in of itself isn’t new, but it wasn’t until recently that people proved the mode could work with the right equipment. What’s so interesting about this whole thing is the fact that HAL Laboratory did it at all. Remember that this is the very early 90s. HAL Laboratory simply wanted to prove what the SNES could do with the right peripheral, but said peripheral never materialized.
7. The Yakuza and the SNES
There’s not a lot we’re super-comfortable with saying about the Yakuza, apart from that we love the way Kazuma Kiryu works it. When they’re not lighting up the dancefloor, they have very strong opinions about how things should be run. Such was the situation with Nintendo, who were genuinely concerned that the Yakuza might hijack an incoming shipment of highly desired Super Nintendo consoles. This was a concern shared by Nintendo President Hiroshi Yamauchi and his advisor Hiroshi Imanishi.
Enter “Operation Midnight Shipping.”
Yes, that really is the name that was given to Nintendo’s decision to sidestep any potential issues with the local gangs that might occur. While the name is at least kind of cool, even if it calls to mind your guilt-filled Amazon binges when you convince yourself that you do actually need 50 new tea towels, the actual mission simply came down to getting the shipments of the system, as well as copies of Super Mario World and F-Zero, out to stores as early into the day as humanly possible.
Whether or not Nintendo was being a little dramatic is up for debate, but the launch of course was a monumental success.
8. Riding the Information Highway
The one peripheral designed to get your SNES online was the XBAND from Catapult Entertainment. A device that was also designed for Sega Genesis players, the XBAND in theory offered players the ability to not only get together online to play against friends, but also to download newsletters and even read email.
Eventually, although XBAND would have an estimated 15,000 subscribers at its peak, and would get involved with the Sega Channel at one point, it ultimately had to shut down in early 1997. Although apparently, your XBAND modem can still get either the Genesis or SNES online in the 2020s.
The other major force that took the SNES (well, technically the Super Famicom) online, so to speak, was the Satellaview. A collaboration between Nintendo and the satellite radio company St.GIGA that never left Japan, the Satellaview only required you to purchase the necessary equipment. You could then access the select hours in which broadcasts would be run that allowed players to download everything from new and old SNES games, to magazines, to various pieces of media and special events.
9. Pretty Hate Mama Mia-chine
There’s a lot of things we associate with Oscar-winning Nine Inch Nails frontman Trent Reznor. While a lot of people know he has long been a video game fanatic, some fail to connect him to one of the most beloved games in Nintendo’s history, with a character named after him in Super Mario World.
No, the ever-cheerful Trent Reznor didn’t have anything to do with the game itself, but his work was an inspiration to one of the people responsible for the localization of the game. Also called the Buibui in Japan, which means “To make the peace sign,”, Reznor the rhino got his name in the west because Nintendo employee Dayvv Brooks, working on the localisation for Super Mario World, happened to be a really big music fan. This is also why all of the Kooplaings, except Ludwig, were named after musicians who at the time were still alive.
Reznor rhinos have appeared sporadically since Super Mario World. Perhaps, most notably in New Super Mario Bros. 2.
10. SNES Did Blast Processing First
Despite Nintendo themselves claiming that Sega’s highly-touted “Blast processing” was nothing more than nonsense invented by Sega themselves, it turns out that not only was blast processing legitimate, but also something the SNES did before the Genesis.
Introduced in Sega’s marketing in 1992, the concept of blast processing very quickly became a talking point in magazines, and among those trying to settle the Nintendo vs. Sega debate once and for all.
While there’s still some debate on what blast processing really means, the most likely explanation is that it refers to pushing data onto the graphics chip of the console, while the scanline was being simultaneously drawn on the screen. If you accept that explanation, then you’ll be interested to know that Sculptured Software developer Jeff Peters has claimed that his studio discovered how to achieve the blast processing effect in their port of Mortal Kombat for the SNES, long before Sega ever mentioned it in their marketing.
However, in the case of the Genesis, the inference of blast processing’s potential concerns graphics, whereas Jeff’s claim concerns creating a process that allowed the developers of the port to maintain the best possible audio quality.
11. A 1991 Compilation Album Licensed By Nintendo Promoted the SNES and Super Mario World Too
Besides the fact that Nintendo’s only compilation album features a great previously unreleased track by Roy Orbison, the 1991 MCA Records co-venture Nintendo: White Knuckle Scorin’ also includes a song that tried to promote literacy and Super Mario World at the same time. Whether or not the song was successful in doing those things is debatable, since the album seemed to come and go without making much fuss.
Contemporary reviews didn’t really know what to make of White Knuckle Scorin’, except for the unreleased Roy Orbison song being the artist’s first new song since his passing in 1988.
But you can’t deny the song by the band Jellyfish, written from the perspective of King Bowser and his naked rage at Princess Toadstool teaching Yoshi and his Koopaling children how to read, is pretty damn catchy. The album included a comic book that promoted Super Mario World while referencing this song, and it’s the only song on the entire album that has anything to do with Nintendo.
12. How Many Modes Did the SNES Really Have?
Turns out the SNES had more to offer than just Mode-7 graphics, as there were in fact 8 different modes available within the system.
One of the main features touted for the SNES before and after its release was the addition of Mode-7 graphics. Simply put, Mode-7 refers to a mode of graphics in which the game’s background layer can be rotated and scaled on a scanline-to-scanline basis to do all sorts of cool depth effects with the background of the game. Racing games like Mario Kart and F-Zero took full advantage of this, but you could also find Mode-7 examples in such games as Super Castlevania IV, Final Fantasy IV and VI, and NHL Stanley Cup.
While a pretty well-known element of what made the SNES unique, it wasn’t the only mode. Numbered from 0 to 7, you can find games that used different modes across the SNES library. Mode 0, for example, was often used for screens of text, which was important in games like Final Fantasy IV. Mode 3 on the other hand was rarely used for actual gameplay but was often needed for title screens.
13. The Bizarre Way SNES Family Feud Checked Your Answers
Weird glitches in retro games is the sort of subject that never gets boring, and that includes the SNES. Some glitches can cause the game to freeze or become otherwise unplayable, such as Super Punch-Out freezing under certain conditions, but it can also yield completely insane playing experiences. Family Feud for the Super Nintendo, released in late 1993, is one of the weirdest examples we’ve ever heard of.
What makes Family Feud unique, and perhaps even worth playing in the modern era, is its text parser. Rather than read an entire answer to determine whether or not you’re right, it will only check to see if the letters of the answer are present in alphabetical order.
So, if the game asks you to name something used only in winter, and you spend 4,000 minutes manually typing in “The All Weather Shitter”, the game will recognize that as “Heater.” Your mileage for how fun this really is may vary.
14. There Was a SNES Sequel to Link to the Past?
Known in the west as BS The Legend of Zelda: Ancient Stone Tablets, with the BS standing for “Broadcast Satellaview”, this is the A Link to the Past sequel you never knew existed.
Set several years after the events of the SNES classic The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, players once again take on the role of Link, who is now quested with gathering the Ancient Stone Tablets. This is all done while learning more about the younger brother of a major NPC from the first game. In the modern era, this could easily be compared to some ambitious post-game content.
By no means as long as the SNES game, Ancient Stone Tablets nevertheless gave players in Japan only a truly unique opportunity to expand on a beloved game and story. The game could only be played for an hour at a time, through Satellaview broadcasts that ran at certain hours. While a very accurate facsimile has been created from dumped materials stored on memory packs, it’s impossible to play the game in its original form.
15. The Father of the PlayStation Helped with the SNES
Going back to when Nintendo dumped Sony mid-stream during a collaboration on what would have been a CD-ROM add-on for the Super Nintendo, the relationship between the two companies has always been a bit frosty.
But that wasn’t always the case, and you can even look at the many brilliant minds who worked on the system to see that future PlayStation 1 designer Ken Kutaragi designed the SCP700 sound chip that would power the SNES console throughout its life. As the story goes, Kutaragi developed the chip without Sony’s knowing, and it was an intervention from Sony President Norio Ogha that not only prevented Kutaragi’s firing but opened the door to a brief-but-profoundly important period of cooperation between Sony and Nintendo.
While we remember a fierce rivalry between the two companies, particularly in the late 90s, Ken Kutaragi doesn’t think of it that way at all. “We were workmates,” he said in a recent interview, but “People outside didn’t think so.”
READ NEXT: 15 PS2 Facts You Might Not Know, Maybe
Some of the coverage you find on Cultured Vultures contains affiliate links, which provide us with small commissions based on purchases made from visiting our site.
