Super Nintendo
- Years active 1991 — 1999
- Units sold 49.1M
- Launch price $199
- NA library 717 games
The Super Nintendo Entertainment System is Nintendo's second programmable home console, released as the Super Famicom in Japan in 1990 and as the Super NES in North America in 1991. A fourth-generation 16-bit system, it competed with Sega's Genesis in one of the most closely fought console wars on record.
The SNES is widely regarded as the high-water mark of 2D game design: a generation when developers had matured around fixed hardware constraints just as 3D rendering was about to rewrite everyone's assumptions. The library still reads like a best-of list of the medium: Super Mario World, A Link to the Past, Chrono Trigger, Final Fantasy III, Super Metroid, Donkey Kong Country.
Fun fact Mode 7, the spinning, scaling floor effect used in F-Zero and Super Mario Kart, was a single hardware feature: a real-time affine transformation on one background layer.
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