SUPER-POWERED

THE SNES IS UNDENIABLY A SUPERB CONSOLE, AND WITH HUNDREDS OF GAMES AVAILABLE THERE ARE PLENTY OF CLASSICS TO CHOOSE FROM. BUT WHICH GAMES REALLY MADE THE MOST OF THE HARDWARE AVAILABLE, AND HOW DID THEY DO IT? WE TAKE A LOOK AND FIND OUT

They say that all good things are worth waiting for, and Nintendo fans of the early Nineties knew that all too well – after all, Super Mario Bros 3 was nearly three years old by the time it arrived on our shores. The SNES is undeniably a good thing, being the console that Retro Gamer readers voted as the greatest games system of all time back in 2018, and a long wait was inevitable – nearly a year and a half passed between the Japanese launch of the Super Famicom and the UK arrival of the SNES. That means that this year marks our 30th anniversary with the console.

To celebrate this anniversary, we’re taking a look back at 30 games that really tested the SNES hardware on a technical level, and we’ve asked a variety of industry professionals what impressed them too. The popularity of the console meant that it was home to over 1,700 games, and the system’s long life meant that developers had plenty of time to really explore the hardware and get the very best out of it. Over the years, Nintendo’s machine had the chance to excel in just about every genre possible, and the variety of the games we’ve chosen here is testament to the breadth of its library.

To be clear, this list is also in no particular order, as all of the games deserve recognition without silly things like rankings getting in the way. We’re also judging these games solely on their achievements with the SNES hardware – though there are certainly plenty of classics to be found in the list, these might not be the best games for the system, nor better than versions available for other platforms. However, all of them make impressive use of Nintendo’s 16-bit hardware in some way, be it a graphical achievement, amazing audio or a feat of clever programming. So without further ado, let’s take a look at the first game on the list.

STAR FOX

NINTENDO EAD/ARGONAUT • 1993

■ One of the interesting things about the SNES is that so many of the console’s games didn’t just reach the theoretical limits of the machine, but used additional technology in order to exceed them. The first cartridge with an added chip shipped when the SNES was just weeks old, but for the most part these weren’t something that anyone made a big deal of – their effect wasn’t seen to be transformative.

With the development of the Super FX chip, all of that changed. Argonaut’s supplemental processor allowed for fast 3D polygonal graphics to be displayed on the SNES, and quickly became a marketing point on the games that used it. Star Fox was the first of them, and the rail shooter was enormously impressive – just about every foreground object was made of polygons, from giant walking robots to deadly tunnels, and of course the massive floating head of big baddie Andross.

Action games with filled polygons were still a relative rarity in arcades when was released, with Namco’s having only launched a year and a half prior. To have such a game running