PLAYING WITH SUPER POWER INSIDE THE SUPER NINTENDO
Videogames hardware production is a fascinating business, and one that has a couple of odd, counterintuitive quirks. The first one is that technological superiority is usually more harmful than it is helpful – if power drove sales, we’d still be talking about the dominance of the Atari Lynx and Xbox. The second is that success is hard to sustain for two generations in a row. All too often, companies have followed up their most popular systems with machines that range from underwhelming to total bombs, such as the Atari 5200, Saturn and Xbox One. As the longest tenured hardware manufacturer in the business, Nintendo has hardly been immune from these truths, with the Nintendo 64 and Wii U serving as ample proof. But it has produced the only machine we can think of that served as an exception to both of those statements at the same time – the Super Nintendo Entertainment System, or Super Famicom as it’s known in Japan. But as readers will know, it’s far more than just a historical anomaly, and is one of the most highly regarded platforms in the history of videogames, and much of its success can be attributed to Nintendo’s hardware design prowess.
In the late Eighties, Nintendo was the powerhouse of the videogames business. The Famicom had successfully conquered the Japanese market, and it had successfully exported the technology to the USA, reviving its console business following the crash of 1983. Like any company with a successful product on the market, Nintendo was not particularly keen on abandoning the NES, but the people at the top were aware of new technology on the horizon – mostly because Hudson Soft had initially tried to sell it to Nintendo. Having been turned down, Hudson joined forces with electronics giant NEC to launch the PC Engine in October 1987. The small, powerful machine captivated Japanese players, with over half a million units sold in just its first few months on the market. This coincided with a downturn in domestic Famicom sales, and while Nintendo was still the market leader, it clearly couldn’t rest on its laurels. Late in September of 1988, Sega announced its 16-bit Mega Drive, just a month ahead of its October release. If Nintendo didn’t show its hand soon, there was a real chance that players would drift to these new machines.
In November 1988, Nintendo invited hundreds of members of the Japanese press to its announcement of its new 16-bit console – the Super Famicom. Not long after, it found its way into Computer & Video Games courtesy of Julian ‘Jaz’ Rignall. “We used to buy Japanese magazines from a shop near St Paul’s [Cathedral], near to where our offices were. We’d buy these magazines every month for the most part just to see what was happening on the Mega Drive and PC Engine, those were the most popular consoles at the time. We bought some one month and lo and behold, there were some pictures of the Super Famicom,” he recalls. “We got the news stories translated and turned them into news pieces for CVG, and we published the first pictures in the UK – which were literally snipped out of a Japanese magazine with scissors.”
This early showing confirmed many of the technical details
