When you think of the Super Nintendo, what’s the first thing you think of? If you answered “a Smith & Wesson,” first of all, Mario Is Missing was not that bad. But it’s not really accurate. There were only some first-person shooters on the SNES, and I’ve been sure to only include games today that aren’t just lightgun or on-rails shooters. You gotta be able to move and look at walls a bit like this. Because at the end of the day, guys, let’s face it:
Faceball 2000
Before Wolfenstein or Doom ever hit a console, the SNES had Faceball 2000. Well, actually an Atari system did first, but I’ll get to that in a second.
Faceball 2000 is a pastel-coloured acid trip where you, a floating smiley face named “Happyface,” wander a 3D maze shooting other emoji-esque orbs to death. It sounds daft because it is, but underneath the candy coating is a direct descendant of MIDI Maze from 1987, one of the very first networked multiplayer FPS games. That original ran on Atari ST computers connected via MIDI cables, making Faceball 2000 an early console adaptation of an online first-person shooter — in 1992.
The SNES port was developed by Xanth Software F/X, a studio co-founded by John Romero’s ex-colleague Mark S. Goodman. It’s also both impressively smooth and hilariously slow. The game runs in full 3D and even supports two-player split-screen, making it the first console FPS to do so. There were plans for the Game Boy version to have 16-player link mode, but it was canned before release, though some nutters did get it working. Weirdly, that Game Boy version has strafing, but this one doesn’t. It does have regenerating health though, years before Call of Duty made it the thing in FPS games.
It’s clunky and mechanically basic, but it walked so other SNES FPS games could run. Just about, as you will see. If Wolfenstein is the godfather of console FPS, Faceball 2000 is the weird uncle who did a few too many drugs. Right, that’s a raptor on Faceball.
Jurassic Park
It’s no Warpath on PS1, but this is not a bad dinosaur game at all. And bizarrely ambitious. Why are so many of them?
Ocean’s Jurassic Park is one of those SNES movie tie-ins where ambition wildly outstrips the hardware, and nobody asked them to do all dat.
At first glance it’s a perfectly harmless top-down adventure about Alan Grant jogging around the island collecting keycards like he’s doing a very specific Tesco shop. But step indoors and the whole thing pivots into a full 3D first-person maze. You’ve got flat-shaded corridors, smooth(ish) turning, ambient humming, and raptors that appear about three frames before they bite your head off.
These sections weren’t an afterthought or a lazy bit of trend chasing. Interestingly, this game doesn’t just predate DOOM on SNES, it predates DOOM in general. Ocean actually commissioned an entirely separate engine for these sections, reportedly developed by a small internal team who’d never built a 3D game before.
The SNES and PC versions of Jurassic Park share the same basic idea, but the differences in execution are massive. The indoor shooter sections on PC are simply cleaner and more legible, whereas on SNES they’re grainy, slow, and prone to framerate dips that make raptors feel like they’re teleporting. While the SNES version is technically interesting for trying to pull off realtime first-person corridors on console hardware, there’s no real contest in which you should play.
It’s clunky, won’t let you save, and is impossible without a map, but Jurassic Park on the Super Nintendo is also one of the boldest 3D experiments on the SNES.
Yoshi’s Safari
Ah, before you start, let me just supply my own asterisk here.
Yoshi’s Safari is Nintendo’s first crack at a first-person shooter, though they’d sooner swallow a Super Scope than admit it. Yes, it’s technically on rails and not an FPS in the absolute strictest sense, but you’re not just a passenger, and that’s why I’ve allowed it in. You hop over gaps, weave through obstacles, adjust your pace by how aggressively you shoot, and generally feel like you’re doing more than watching a glorified theme-park ride. For a SNES light-gun game, it is pretty hands on.
But it was built for one reason. Nintendo desperately wanted the Super Scope to look like a proper accessory and not just a big tube, so EAD put together this Mode-7 shooter where Mario sits on Yoshi’s back like Steven Segal sits on his arse for the the last twenty movies, blasting mechanical Koopas with a crosshair.
It is repetitive, but it doesn’t stick around for too long and also the final boss is Bowsear wearing a giant suit of armour.
A couple of good trivia bits: this is the first Western game where Peach is actually called Peach, and it’s one of the only times the Koopalings canonically pilot mechs. That raises too many questions.
It’s probably the most constantly overlooked Mario game, and that’s really a shame as it’s just fun to talk about. Nintendo, you got them mice controllers on the Switch 2 now, that’s all I’m saying.
MechWarrior
MechWarrior on the SNES shouldn’t work, and yet it does. Granted, in a charming “this act is a defiance of God” way, but still!
Instead of handing you a cut-down arcade shooter, Beam Software ported over the spirit of the PC game into a bit of a Mode 7 starshooter. You’ve got a full cockpit view, heat management, slow stomping movement, radar sweeps, and the general vibe of being trapped inside a walking boiler. It takes place within the Battletech board game universe, which has a game just called Battletech now, but also we’re still getting Mechwarrior games?
Unlike most “3D” SNES experiments, this isn’t just corridors or rails. You get proper freedom to turn, walk, and upgrade your mechs before you take on contracts, which is neat. Missions actually encourage scouting rather than mindless shooting because your mech overheats faster than the wolfman drinking a cup of tea in the sahara.
The problem is that the framerate dips into “PowerPoint slideshow” territory whenever there are more than two enemies, buildings, or explosions within a postcode. Turning your mech too quickly causes the whole screen to smear like it’s been rendered in treacle. Add in no strafing and it does become a bit of an ordeal to get through. A cool ordeal, but still.
Interestingly, MechWarrior did get a sequel on SNES, but MechWarrior 3050 returned things to a far less clunky isometric view. Better the wolf you know, and all that.
Wolfenstein 3D
The SNES port of Wolfenstein 3D is probably the worst way to experience the classic, but it’s mental it even exists really. Nintendo’s early-90s content rules were ruthless, so Imagineer had to strip out almost everything recognisably Nazi. Imagine Schindler’s List with just a balloon.
No Hitler, no swastikas, no gore, no corpses, and the guard dogs were replaced with mutant rats who look like they wandered in from Shadowrun. Yet despite all that, it still feels unmistakably like Wolfenstein….if you can see what’s going on at all? This thing feels like it was made from the memory of the dogs who got cut from it. It’s blurrier than a Dead Meat Kill Count released in 2025.
The port was rebuilt from the ground up using a mix of PC and Jaguar design notes, and while the framerate takes regular nosedives, the core experience survived. Ya got tight corridor navigation, shooting dudes, and keys. It gets the job done, but again, it just isn’t great to look at. At all. I need to look my not Nazis in the eyes when I compassionately euthanise them with theoretical bullets.
Imagineer themselves admitted in interviews that they were constantly fighting Nintendo’s approval team, having to redraw rooms, portraits, sprites, even menu art multiple times before it passed certification. And in Japan, they did restore the dogs because Nintendo of Japan didn’t share Nintendo of America’s hang-ups about canine violence, but the rest of the censorship stayed.
It’s compromised and sanitised, but still kinda interesting as a footnote in the console’s history. Weirdly, this next game might actually be better on the Super Nintendo?
Super 3D Noah’s Ark
Super 3D Noah’s Ark is one of the strangest artefacts on the SNES, and that’s saying something for a console with a game about Tim Allen shooting dinosaurs.
It’s an unlicensed, Christian-themed reskin of Wolfenstein 3D, built by Wisdom Tree after id Software allegedly handed them the engine out of sheer irritation with Nintendo’s censorship rules. Whether that lore is fully true is….debated, but it’s fun to imagine John Carmack printing off a bunch of code and angrily scrunching it up before throwing it at these devs just to get back at Nintendo.
Super 3D Noah’s Ark is a Doom-era FPS where Noah fires animal feed at animals until they fall asleep. When you run out of ammo, you then have to feed them by hand, but it just looks kinda like you’re making obscene Italian gestures at goats.
Because Nintendo wouldn’t approve the game due to its religious nature, Wisdom Tree had to get clever. They designed a pass-through cartridge, where you plug an official SNES game into this, then this into the console, piggybacking off the legit cartridge’s CIC lockout chip. It’s basically the 16-bit equivalent of climbing through your neighbour’s window because you forgot your own keys, then nicking their fridge.
The surreal part is that it runs surprisingly well. Well, well enough. The colour palette is bright and the enemies have a consistency to their behaviour that almost feels like a proper video game. It’s still Wolfenstein’s bones underneath, sure, but wrapped in a Sunday School coat of paint that kind of makes it, I dunno, unique?
Super 3D Noah’s Ark is strange and overall not massively great, but it’s got over 30 levels of first-person feeding fun, but we wouldn’t blame you for giving up the ghost before the end.
Spectre
This one’s the perfect example of a SNES game that fell through the cracks. Playing similarly to Battlezone with you hunting down flags across possibly haunted chess landscapes, Spectre launched in 1994, but very few folks ever talk about it. It saw a North American release only, with French and German versions via Gametek, and never landed in Japan.
It isn’t polished like the major games on the SNES, which you should kinda expect really for a genre they hadn’t really figured out on console yet. The visuals, objects and effects are ultra-minimal. It looks like another game should be laid over the top of it.
But that sparseness worked in the game’s favour to allow the devs to try other things.
You see, what makes Spectre interesting is that you get full two-player modes. In multiplayer you can pick from Arena, Flag Rally, Base Raid, or Allied Attack, which is as much variety as like…Battlefield 6? Crazy stuff. But would I choose this nightmare over most modern shooters? Probably not.
Spectre is somewhat forgotten, but deserves a look precisely because it offers genuine 3Dish movement, free-roaming (ish) arenas and multiplayer. On the SNES!
Doom
By the time Doom landed on the SNES, most people expected a smoking crater where the cartridge slot used to be. Instead, Sculptured Software somehow shoved id’s notoriously stubborn code into a Super FX2-powered cartridge and told it to behave. And they didn’t even have the Rainbow Badge yet!
Oh, and by Sculptured Software, I mean mostly one dude called Randy Linden.
Yes, it’s a trimmed-down, wobbly compromise. There are fewer levels, simplified layouts, missing textures, and a framerate that occasionally wheezes like an 18 year old pitbull trying to get to the top of the Burj Khalifa, but it is still, unmistakably, Doom. You run, you blast demons square in the face, you try to interact with every wall you see, all on a SNES. It shouldn’t work, but it does, and that alone makes it one of the biggest technical stunts in video game history.
The depth comes from the ridiculous amount of work needed to get it there. The dev team basically rebuilt the entire rendering pipeline around the Super FX2 chip, redrew sprites to fit memory limits, and re-paced enemy encounters so the hardware didn’t collapse. Even the automap system was retooled to avoid screen tearing. The Super FX2 was acting as the game’s life support machine, and you can tell. It does feel like the game could die at any point. It’s worth bearing in mind that computers in 1995 were like 10 times more powerful than the Super Nintendo.
It’s messy and technically fragile, but Doom on the SNES remains one of the most audacious things anyone ever forced a SNES to do. Basically at gunpoint.
Akira (Cancelled)
If you’ve not engaged with pop culture for 40 years, Akira is a cyberpunk story set in a rebuilt Neo-Tokyo, where two childhood friends get caught up in a government conspiracy surrounding secret experiments, test subjects, and overwhelming psychic power. Its movie adaptation changed anime forever, so you know some boring contrarian on Letterboxd has given it three stars.
What you’re seeing right now is camcorder footage from CES 1994 of the Akira game for the Genesis, which was also planned for the SNES. It was apparently also coming to SEGA CD, Game Boy and Game Gear.
The only SNES specific screenshot we had for years came from an issue of Game Zone, in which Tetsuo looks like he’s taken a trip to Springfield.
Around 5 years ago, very incomplete builds for the Genesis game leaked online, in which you can see Tetsuo just absolutely vaporise a poor nurse.
The project was structured as a multi-genre adaptation of the film, which had released six years prior. You’d have had side-scrolling brawling, top-down exploration, cinematics, and also those first-person sections. So, what happened?
According to an old interview, publishers THQ just kind of massively overestimated what the SNES was capable of and then neglected the project as it went along…and it just kind of faded into nothingness when the programmer left. THQ being a bit useless? Inconceivable.
Weirdly, considering it’s such a massive cultural touchstone with DNA in basically everything, we’ve not had many Akira video games since. We did get completely separate versions for the Commodore Amiga and the Amiga CD32, but they were absolute cheeks. Apart from those, we’ve only had…Akira Pinball on PS2? I’m not saying I need an extraction shooter Akira game, but imagine like a Disaster Report game mixed with something like The Warriors. Would be pretty cool right?
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