Switchboard is Polygon’s weekly newsletter for all things Nintendo, sent on Thursdays and published on the site on Saturdays. You can subscribe here.
This Sunday, Aug. 23, is the 35th anniversary of the release of the Super Nintendo Entertainment System in North America. We’ll be celebrating the console with a series of articles on Polygon over the weekend, so I’m not going to dive too deep into its brilliance, or the generational hot streak that it inspired in Nintendo’s in-house studios, here. But I thought I’d share a personal perspective on it.
I grew up with the video games of the 1980s home computer scene in the U.K.; my foundational texts were the likes of Manic Miner, the early works of Rare (then called Ultimate Play the Game), and the homebrew aesthetic of solo coders like Jeff Minter. I largely missed the 16-bit era in my teens because my family couldn’t afford a new computer or console. I remember yearning for an Atari ST and coveting my best friend’s Sega Genesis (called the Mega Drive over here). I drifted away from games and got into movies. I had basically no contact with Nintendo at all.
Then, when I was at university in the mid-’90s, my roommate bought an old, used SNES. At that point, the console was at the end of its life — PlayStation had just launched, and Nintendo 64 was around the corner. But it was new to me. My friend got two games with it, Super Mario World and Super Mario Kart.
I simply couldn’t believe these two games. I was astonished. It’s not that I was totally out of touch with the medium; I knew there’d been far more graphically rich games in the past few years, and I understood that 3D was about to happen. Super Mario World and Super Mario Kart looked pretty simple, even then.
Bear in mind, though, that I’d never played a Shigeru Miyamoto-designed game before, or experienced game software that had been through Nintendo’s famously rigorous testing. The two games married an incredibly tactile, almost physical solidity with design that was at once abstract, intricate, and mischievous. Their childish simplicity betrayed an ocean of sophistication and depth that could be explored — and even felt — with just a handful of basic digital inputs.
Super Mario World stunned me by the way it kept inventing new rulesets, then breaking, subverting, or discarding them. And Super Mario Kart… well, we played it every single day for a year, my friend and I finessing our driving skills into a finely pointed rivalry as we slid expertly around courses made of chocolate mud.
I’ll never forget it. This pair of SNES classics reawakened my love of video games and vastly expanded my understanding of the medium’s potential for invention and finesse. Without them, I wouldn’t have had this career or be writing to you now. I soon had a PlayStation (or my girlfriend did, anyway), was reading Edge magazine, was exploring the Nintendo back catalog, and was eagerly anticipating the N64, Super Mario 64, and The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time.
A whole world opened up to me. But I still think — if you take personal context into account, and how can you not — that Super Mario World and Super Mario Kart are the two greatest video games I have ever played.
eShop game of the week: Duskfade
Relive the cute-but-serious PS2 era of Kingdom Hearts and Jak and Daxter with this expert tribute from developer Weird Beluga. They don’t make action-platformers like this anymore. “Duskfade is a wonderful time. It never overstays its welcome. It’s wholesome, funny, somewhat challenging at times, and it rewards exploration. It’s a nostalgia bullseye,” wrote Ford James in Polygon’s review.
Nintendo Classics game of the week: Panel de Pon
You probably know this game as Tetris Attack; this is the original Japanese release, without the Mario characters and the Tetris licence that Nintendo of America rather mercenarily slapped on it. Anyway, it’s an unfussy and absolutely superb match-three puzzle game by Intelligent Systems of Fire Emblem and Paper Mario fame. One of the SNES’ best.
Nintendo Music track of the week: “Title Screen” from Super Metroid
The SNES’ Super Metroid has one of the most evocative and atmospheric title screens of all time: a Metroid pulses in captivity in a lab, the floor scattered with scientists’ corpses. It’s made all the more unforgettable by this chilling, minimalist loop of pulsing bass, ominous synth, and strange breathing sounds.
This week’s most interesting releases
1000xResist
- Aug. 20
- Switch 2
- It’s already out on Switch, but any excuse to recommend this superb sci-fi narrative adventure
Grim Trials
- Aug. 20
- Switch, Switch 2
- Extremely Hades-coded action roguelite
DayZ: Cool Edition
- Aug. 20
- Switch 2
- Rock it like it’s 2018 as the venerable multiplayer zombie survival game arrives on Switch 2
Driving is Hard
- Aug. 20
- Switch
- Challenging physics platformer in which you drive a bathtub on wheels
Blood Dungeon
- Aug. 25
- Switch, Switch 2
- Extravagant bullet-heaven platformer from creators of Nidhogg