Super Mother Fu**ing Nintendo

Now we're playing with power. Super power!

Back in 1990 it seemed like the world couldn't get any better. We'd just experienced a Batman movie, the Gulf War was yet to happen, and all five members of Aerosmith had been clean and sober for a couple years. Oh, and there was this little gray box called Nintendo. Nope, life couldn't get much sweeter than that.

But then came the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES). From the first glance, it just HAD to be better. I mean, fuck, it had two more buttons on the front called "X" and "Y". Maybe this meant that Mario could do different kinds of jumps, or throw something other than fire. The possibilities seemed endless.

My first experience with the SNES came at a family get together in Napanee Ontario (home of Miss Avril Lavigne and the Napanee Beaver). My cousin Wayne brought his Super Nintendo and introduced me to a game called NHLPA '93. Up until that point my only hockey game experience really was Blades of Steel. But holy shit, in NHLPA '93 you could play as real teams with real NHL players! You could skate as Mike Gartner or Al Iafrate! Sure, most people wanted to be Lemieux or Gretzky, but I was happy to have Ron Hextal in net. Later that day I started playing Super Mario World and Starfox. I was hooked.

When I returned home, I tried playing Blade of Steel again. It just wasn't the same anymore. I tried doing my own commentary for the game, but I lost track of which of my players was Mike Gartner pretty fast. Pretty soon I was begging my parents for a Super Nintendo. At first it was a hard sell. Both parents insisted that the regular Nintendo was just fine. We all did our best to pretend that blinking thing it did was just part of the fun of the game. But since my mom likes Mario and my dad likes Tetris, I eventually convinced them we needed super power.


I consider the Super Nintendo to be the greatest video game system ever made. Sure, the graphics are dated now, but they were pretty good for 16-bit at the time. What made this system so special was the play value of the games. Sure, from time to time you'd still get a dud game like Batman Forever or Mega Robot Golf, but the great definitely outweighed the bad.

Nintendo was smart too. They knew how popular the original Mario games were, so they re-packaged them together on one cartridge with the long-lost (and super-difficult) original version of Super Mario 2. They made a new Zelda adventure that knocked the socks off the original. They helped bring Mortal Kombat to our blood-thirsty attention... even though the SNES version didn't have any blood in it. All in all, they totally one-upped their classic NES with the Super Nintendo.

Even the smallest detail of loading the games in the top of the machine to avoid that horrible blinking was pure genius.

The only real competition at the time was the Sega Genesis, a system similar to the SNES but a little more risque with their games. The Genesis had no problem showing blood and guts in Mortal Kombat. This video game war divided friendships in the schoolyards. You either liked Super Nintendo or Sega Genesis. It was like being in the middle of a huge war over race and religion.  Or kinda like WWF versus WCW. Eventually the SNES outlasted Sega's baby, much to no surprize.

So let's all tip our hats to the Super Nintendo. It didn't set the stage for where video games are now, but it definitely pointed the evolution in the right track.

Thanks for reading!
- ryan