My Experience with the Virtual Boy

Because I had recently started a new paper route and had direct access to the money I earned, I had began buying more video games and hardware. I started saving up for what I assumed would be the new craze – the Virtual Boy. I read about it mainly from Nintendo Power and was planning on getting one. I was a little put off by the red monochrome, but still wanted one. To get myself used to how the VB would look, I played Game Boy games on the Super Game Boy, but made the colors black and 3 shades of red to match what I had seen from screenshots in magazines.

I had saved up almost enough money, but because I had been getting into card collecting and comics at the time, I was short about $20. It turns out that my family would be in Boise at a family party on the day of the release, which worked out well in my favor. Growing up in the small town I lived in, I was used to our stores and theaters not getting things on release dates. But I would have to have all the money that day. I managed to talk my friend Jake into lending me $20 to get the VB on release day, and in exchange, he would get to keep and play it until I paid him back.

Part of the way through the family get-together, my dad agreed to take me to Fred Meyer. We bought the VB and returned to my grandma’s house. I set it up and played it for a bit. My uncles and a few cousins all took a quick peek at it but didn’t seem super impressed. I tried to play it on the way home, but it wasn’t really meant to be portable, so I had to wait until I got home.

Since it came with Mario’s Tennis, and it was the only game I had, I was forced to play tennis, but I learned how tennis worked for the first time in my life. Occasionally I played it by laying in bed and resting the unit on my face, but most of the time I had it set up on my desk in my room.

As soon as I got paid for the next month, I paid Jake back and got Red Alarm, an airplane game. This was the game I was most excited for, as I was a fan of airplane/flight simulator games. I liked it, but wished that things weren’t just a wire frame.

It usually ran on 6 AA batteries, but I wanted an AC adapter so I didn’t have to replace batteries all the time, having gone through that issue with the Super Scope a couple years earlier. The AC adapter was $20, and I was short on the cash, having just paid back Jake and bought Red Alarm and some comics. So I kinda pulled the same stunt with my friend Travis. He lent me the money to get the AC adapter and in exchange he got to keep the VB for a couple weeks until I got the cash. The actual cord was identical to a SNES cord, but required the adapter to attach it to the Virtual Boy controller. 

The only other game I bought for it was Golf. So officially that means that 2/3 of my games for it were sports games, technically. None of the other games that were available at Wal-Mart/K-Mart seemed interesting at the time, and I was itching to get another game for the VB to have a little variety. As a golf game, it was on par (ha!) with all of the other modern golf games, but it made me wish that it had a green screen instead of red.

After the novelty of it wore off, I started playing it less and less often. The neck/eye strain combined with the fact that the games weren’t anything special started to wear on me.

Eventually, I put it back into its box, which I had kept. I would pull it out here and there, but the stand cracked at the spot where the two legs hinged, forcing me to play it balanced on my face. I threw the stand away, but I should have at least kept the small connector piece. There are a lot of DIY stand suggestions online, but they all require having that particular piece, unfortunately.

Much later, I got a gift from my friend Michael. He was in Japan, and had seen some sort of clearance bin that had VB games for cheap. He bought V-Tetris, a Japanese-only release. It had regular Tetris, as well as a version that had a 3-D version with a rotatable base – sorta like putting Tetris pieces inside of a drinking glass.

[not actually me]

It sat in its box for years, but I would pull it out every so often to show someone. One time I was showing my son the VB but it wasn’t working correctly. The picture was messed up, kind of reminding me of what happened to NES games when there was a little dust on the contacts. I tried cleaning it but it didn’t help anything. As it turns out, this was a common problem with old Virtual Boys. The ribbons that connected the motherboard to the displays on either side were glued together. After about 8 to 10 years, the glue dried out and cracked, allowing the ribbon to separate which messes up the display and causes it to draw horizontal lines over parts of the screen.

Years later, a group of Nintendo enthusiasts I belong to were having a little “Nintendo Museum,” showing every system ever made. Nobody but me had a VB, so it was up to me to bring mine. I went online to see if I could find a solution to the line problem. I learned about the cracked glue problem, and read that one solution was to heat up the glue to re-attach the ribbon. I had to make a special tool to remove the security screws that all Nintendo systems use by taking a screwdriver and grinding out the middle. Once I got them out, I followed a tutorial from YouTube to fix it. I replaced the screws with regular Phillips-head screws to make future repairs easier. I also bought a 3-D printed clip that allows me to connect the Virtual Boy to a standard camera tripod so that I can play it as it was intended, but now with a lot more versatility in adjusting the height and angle so that it doesn't cause the neck/back strain it did originally. 

Somehow I also had lost my copy of Mario's Tennis, so I purchased a used one from eBay to replace it. Finally, I found someone who is able to solder the lenses to the ribbon cable, thus eliminating the cracked glue problem for good. In early 2023, I found a website that sold replacement stands that are nearly indistinguishable from the genuine article. It even came with a cross brace to prevent the exact problem that plagued these stands from occurring again, and it was a 10-cent piece of plastic - something Nintendo probably should have thought about including originally. Between new screws, new clip, a replacement game, and the soldering job, I have probably spent as much on restoring/maintaining my Virtual Boy as I did purchasing it originally. 

The Virtual Boy

In the middle of the “Bit-Wars,” Nintendo had accidentally made some new competition for itself by making a deal with Sony to manufacture a CD add-on device to the SNES. When Nintendo reneged, Sony decided to make their own console: the PlayStation, a 32-bit CD based system. SEGA had also made something similar – the SEGA Saturn. Nintendo had opted to skip the 32-bit era and move directly on to a 64-bit system. But in the meantime, they released the Virtual Boy, a 32-bit system that was unlike anything that had come before, and anything that has come out since.

The Virtual Boy looks like a bulky, expensive pair of goggles or futuristic space binoculars. Instead of using a TV screen, this system provided its own display (kind of like a Game Boy), but the player would have to stick his head into the system to play it. Home computing and the Web were the new and trendy tech things that were catching on, but everyone was talking about “Virtual Reality,” and music videos, movies, and TV shows were popularizing the term. The VB seemed to glam onto this concept, but in reality it was a simple gimmick to produce a 3D image.

By calling it the Virtual BOY, it implied that it was portable and the successor to the popular Game Boy line of hardware. But it wasn’t portable at all. It was far too bulky and delicate to carry around in a backpack, and it couldn’t just be played anywhere. It couldn’t be strapped to one’s head (like most virtual reality demos showed), and instead the goggles were set atop an adjustable 2-legged stand that was meant to be used on a desktop or table.

Full color screens would have meant that the system’s cost would have basically doubled, so in order to save money, Nintendo opted for a red monochrome screen. Like the Game Boy, it could only do 4 colors – 3 shades of red, and black – on a dot-matrix screen. But for the effect to work, each eye needed its own display, so there were actually 2 projectors, each putting out a slightly different picture that combined into 1 3D image.

The sound was better than a Game Boy, but not as good as a GBA, though it did have the “poppy-clicky” sound features that the GBA would later have. One advantage that the VB had in the sound department is that they knew exactly where the player’s ears would be, so it could sort of simulate surround sound with its stereo speakers. Like the Game Boy, it had a headphone jack and a volume dial on the left side of the bottom.

On the top of the unit were 2 dials. One adjusted the focus (like a projector), and the other changed the distance between the eyepiece and the projector. In order to block out the light, the display had a felt visor that touched the player’s face, kinda accomplishing the same task as when you cup your hands around your face to look into a window on a bright day.

Games were inserted into the front (meaning the end that was farthest from the player’s face) into a small slot. The games came with a small black cover to protect the pins when not in use, but like all past sleeves, they were lost easily.

On the bottom of the VB’s right side were the controller port and the gamelink port (intended to hook up 2 systems à la the Game Boy, but cords and games were never released). The controller for the VB was unique and revolutionary for the time for a few reasons. Revolutionary because it was the first controller to feature 2 D-pads – one on each side, as well as pistol-grip type sides to help hold it comfortably. The controller was symmetrical except for the colors of the buttons; the left side featured gray Start and Select buttons, while the right side had red B and A buttons. R and L buttons were in the back of the controller, and felt more like a trigger than the shoulder buttons on the SNES did. Some questioned why 2 D-pads were needed, but it was easily explained that a single D-pad could handle 2 dimensions nicely, and these games were in 3D. But one unique (by which I mean badly designed) feature was that the power switch was on the controller. The back of the controller featured a removable battery box that held 6 AA batteries. So unlike NES or SNES controllers which pulled power from the console, the console pulled all of its power from the controller. An AC adapter was available that allowed the battery box to be replaced with a cord.

Because Nintendo anticipated the headache and eye-strain complaints, they included a warning to take frequent breaks in the manuals, on the startup screen, and in most games as well (similar to what the Wii and its games suggested).

The Virtual Boy didn’t sell well, and was discontinued after less than a year. The main issues were that the monochrome colors were unappealing, neck and eye strain was rampant, and it wasn’t portable. The stands often broke where the two legs connected because of cheap plastic, forcing players to play with it balanced on their head or make a DIY solution. 3D effect couldn’t be shown in TV or in advertisements, so unless someone took the time and effort to go into a store to try the demo, most people weren’t impressed. Also, unlike a Game Boy (or any console), only one person could see it. Finally, there weren’t any “killer apps” that would make people want to buy the thing. Most games didn’t really take advantage of the one thing that differentiated the VB from all other video games.

In the end, it was a victim of poor timing, poor marketing, and rushed development. 

Additional Resources

Gaming Historian: The Virtual Boy

The Angry Video Game Nerd reviews every VB game

The Super Game Boy

The Super Game Boy was an adapter that let users play Game Boy games on the SNES. It was great for a few reasons.

Firstly, playing it on a TV obviously gave it a bigger screen. Multiple people could watch without crowding. Plus, it was lit up instead of needing sunlight or good indoor light to see so it was easy to play at night or in the dark.

Secondly, and this was probably the biggest advantage, is that the SNES controller was easier to hold than the Game Boy. For those with larger hands, finding a comfortable way to hold the vertically oriented Game Boy without overlapping fingers was difficult. Plus, it was possible to change the button orientation to \ instead of / . That might not seem like a big deal, but it’s much more comfortable to get both buttons with a single thumb.

Thirdly, adding color just made them seem better. It removed the “puke green” background, and colorizing them almost (sorta) made them seem like a regular NES game.

Every game could be given 4 different colors, since the Game Boy could display black, 2 shades of gray, and white (meaning clear, or where no dot was displayed). There were 32 preset palettes, or users could customize their own. Some of the other features like custom borders, animated borders, and being able to draw added some nice touches, albeit unnecessary ones for gameplay.

To duplicate the correct dimensions of the GB, the SGB didn’t display games in full screen. Instead, it had a border around the game. The default border looked like a Game Boy, but there were about 8 other choices. If left alone for long enough, the borders became animated.

At this point, there were 3 kinds of Game Boy games:

Type 1: Regular, ordinary games - of which there were literally hundreds (like Mortal Kombat or Pac-Man).

Type 2: Regular games that Nintendo knew were popular, in-house games (like Kid Icarus or Yoshi). The list of these games is probably fewer than 40 games.

Type 3: Games that were optimized for the Super Game Boy (like Donkey Kong ‘94 or Space Invaders).

For normal games (type 1), after the SGB booted up, the game played like normal. The SGB selected the default palette, which had black, white, and two shades of orange. Once the game loaded, additional palettes could be selected, or one could be custom created. Some of the pre-made palettes had higher contrast or specific combinations (blue/red or green/brown, etc.) and most had some shade of white and black.

For games like Type 2, the SGB loaded like normal, except that it picked a particular built-in palette for the game. So when loading Link’s Awakening, it picked a color scheme with green/brown, or a red/yellow/green palette for Metroid II. This was a feature built into the SGB to recognize that a specific game had been inserted.

Games like Type 3 had a specific logo on the box/game that indicated that it was optimized. These had a custom border that would come up, and would often be in full color. The game was able to use some of the SNES hardware to improve sound. For example, in Donkey Kong ’94 Pauline screams when being taken by DK. On a Game Boy, it just sounds like a high pitched computer bleep. However, on the SGB, she actually screams, “HELP!” in English.

The SGB would let you change the borders and palettes from the optimized ones if you wanted to, but it was best to just use those because of the improved quality. 

   

4 years after the Super Game Boy was released, the Game Boy Color came out. Along with the newer hardware came 2 kinds of games, distinguishable by the color of the plastic of the GamePak.

Type 4: Game Boy Color games (in clear plastic)

Type 5: Cross Compatibility Game Boy Color Games (in Black Plastic)

Game Boy Color games (type 4) could only be played on a Game Boy Color (duh), and were in full color. Because they lacked the little notch in the corner, it prevented people from turning them on in a regular Game Boy. If a GBC game (type 4) is put into the SGB, it displays a nice message that informs the player that the game must be played on a GBC.

But the black ones (type 5) could be played in either system. If played in a GB, it had a black/white four color palette as expected. But if played in a GBC, they would be displayed in full color. Black cartridge games were optimized for the SGB with custom borders, but depending on the game, it would either display full color or just pick one of the preset palettes.

Games that were optimized for the SGB were treated like a type 1 or type 2 game by the GBC, unfortunately, and didn't have any kind of enhancements. 

Additional Resources:

The Gaming Historian reviews the Super Gameboy

My Experience with the Game Boy

The Game Boy came out in 1989 but it was a few years before I got one. While some kids were getting a Game Boy for Christmas to add to their NES, we were just getting the NES (the purpose of this statement is not to complain that my parents were not spoiling us enough – just to establish the time frame). We got Game Boys in Spring of 1993, about a year and a half after getting the SNES.

Until that time, I had a couple of occasions to play one here and there, but not for very long. It wasn’t until we actually got Game Boys that I really got to play it often. Two of my brothers and I share consecutive birthdays, and when I was in 8th grade about to turn 14 (1993), my parents decided we were going to take a week off of school and go to California to do the whole Disneyland/Universal/Sea World thing. To keep us occupied during the plane rides, car trips, and long lines, my parents bought 3 Game Boys to use between the 5 of us (really 4, since the youngest wasn’t really old enough to play). Initially they bought the ones that came with Tetris, headphones, and the link cable. But soon after they returned two of them for the basic set since we didn’t need 3 copies of Tetris. The only downside was not being able to do 2-player Tetris. But along with the systems, they got 5 more games: Yoshi, RC Pro-Am, NFL Football, Mega Man 3, and Kid Icarus: Of Myths and Monsters. In my mind I paired them into 3 groups: Sports (Football/ProAm), Puzzle (Yoshi/Tetris), and Platformers (MegaMan/KidIcarus). They also got rechargeable battery packs for us so they wouldn’t have to spend a lot of money on batteries. They weren’t official Nintendo equipment, and they stuck out from the back of the Game Boy, but it was actually good for me. It made the “circumference” of the device bigger and I could interlock my fingers more comfortably.

My dad pulled a cruel prank on us and told us about the Game Boys about 6 weeks early but told us we couldn’t use them until the trip. To be honest, I was looking forward to the Game Boys more than the Disneyland trip. We snuck them out here and there and got caught once. My mom admitted to playing Kid Icarus once or twice just to see what the fuss was about.

At home we set up little charging stations with the battery paks using little slots on our bunkbeds that happened to be the right size to hold the batteries, and the cords were held in place with masking tape (kid engineering at its finest).

After the initial novelty wore off a little, we didn’t play them as much as the SNES. I don’t know if it’s because we got a later run of them, or if we just got lucky, but the “puke green” colored background was actually more of a, “bespeckled gold” color on our models.

I later bought Metroid II: Return of Samus used from the card shop, then added Super Mario Land 3, Donkey Kong ’94, and Space Invaders to my collection. Obviously I got The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening when it came out.

After having those for a while, I bought the Super Game Boy Adapter. After that, I rarely used the Game Boys, as it was easier to play it on a TV (unless said TV was already being used or I was away from home). I guess I didn’t appreciate the portability aspect of it, as we only brought them on special occasions, like long trips. Mostly I thought of it as another console that happened to be smaller. To me the biggest advantage to having a Game Boy was not that I could take it on the go, or that I had portable versions of my favorite games, but just that I could play certain games that I would be otherwise unable to play.

For example, puzzle games like Yoshi, Dr. Mario, and Tetris were pretty much the same on NES or Game Boy. Games like Mega Man and Kid Icarus were slightly different from their NES counterparts, but pretty much the same thing. If given the choice between playing a game on the NES or Game Boy (provided they were similar), I would always choose the NES. I liked playing the games where a chapter of the story happened to be on the Game Boy (i.e. Metroid 2, Zelda 4, etc.) rather than a Game Boy translation/port.

I didn’t take the Game Boy with me to my first year of college or Japan (obviously), nor did I really do much with them when I got back. I was aware of the recent updates with the Game Boy Pocket but wasn’t super impressed - not enough to warrant buying one. The Game Boy Color came out when I was in Japan but I wasn’t really allowed to play it, nor did I have much inclination as I just assumed it was a 4-color adaptation, like how the Super Game Boy worked and didn’t think much of it. When I got back to the states, my friend bought a Game Boy Color to play Link’s Awakening DX. I didn’t pay much attention to it seeing as how I already owned that game. But looking back I wish I had noticed how much of an improvement it was. 

When I left to live on my own I didn’t take one of the Game Boys with me (something I regret now). I figured that I had the Super Game Boy and left the others for my brothers. Years later when my kids got to be old enough to play games, we had a bit of a renewed interest in playing these older games. My younger brother Matt also happened to have a co-worker who was getting rid of a bunch of GB accessories which he gave to me. So I ended up with a really big case, a magnifier, and a battery pack. This has been great to keep all of the GB and GBC games I've acquired over the years. 

The Game Boy

The Nintendo Game Boy debuted in 1989, and it was the most successful handheld game system of all time until it was surpassed by the DS much later. It was a meant to be a portable NES, in essence. It had an 8-bit processor and a sound chip that was less capable than Nintendo's flagship console. The graphics were made by a dot-matrix grid that could handle 4 colors: White (by which I mean “clear,” or nothing displayed), light grey, dark grey, and black. But even with just 4 colors it was remarkable how clear some of the graphics stayed. Nintendo had produced the “Game & Watch” series of handheld games in the early 1980’s, and were similar to the line of Tiger handheld games, but unlike these earlier games, the Game Boy featured interchangeable games.

The name, "Game Boy" probably evolved from an earlier Japan-only mascot Nintendo had used in their early days: Diskun (pronounced "Dis-coon"). The Japanese language often borrows words from other languages and attempts to pronounce them as close as they can. Examples include, Baiorin (violin), Beesubooru (baseball), and Bideo Geemu (video game). Incidentally, "Famicom" is short for "Famirii Conpyuutaa" (Family Computer), much the same way "Pokemon" is short for "Poketto Monstaa" (Pocket Monster). Because their word for "disk" was "disku," it only took one additional written character to make it into "Diskun." 'Kun' is a title/suffix that Japanese appends to young boys, much the way 'San' is attached to grownups (think Miyagi calling him Daniel-San). Essentially it translated to "Disk Boy," so when the handheld came out, they called it a Geemu Boi, or in English, Game Boy. 

While other portable game systems were horizontally oriented, the Game Boy's form factor was vertical. It featured a small 2.6” (diagonal measurement) screen and the same buttons as the NES (D-pad, Start, Select, B, and A). It had a mono speaker on the front and a volume dial on the side, but when headphones were plugged in to the jack on the bottom, the Game Boy put out stereo sound. It took 4 AA batteries and had about a 30-hour life. There was also a power input jack on the left side to connect an external battery pack or AC adapter, as well as a contrast slider to adjust the darkness. Finally, there was a red light indicating power that would dim if the batteries were about to die. 

The power switch was on the top of the unit and was a mechanical slide which caused a small plastic tab to cover the upper right corner of the games, which had a small notch to allow for this. The idea was to mechanically prevent games from being pulled out while the system was turned on. Each game came with a small plastic case, but like the black NES sleeves they were often lost.

On the right side was the jack for the GameLink cable, which enabled 2-player games on a select number of games, and required both parties to have a copy of the game. There was also a four-player adapter that worked with a handful of games, but it still meant that each person had to have his own system, a copy of the game, a cable, and someone had to bring the adapter. 

The Game Boy came bundled with Tetris, a GameLink Cable, and a pair of headphones. Later a slightly cheaper package was sold that omitted everything except the Game Boy console itself.

Every time the system was turned on, a familiar “ding” played while the Nintendo logo slid down the screen to the middle. The screen background color was known as “puke green,” and in later models was more of a speckled gold color. The screen was not lit, so it required good indoor lighting or being played outdoors. After-market adapters that magnified and lit the screen could be used to play at night. Other accessories included the Game Boy Camera (a rudimentary digital camera), the Game Boy Printer (a thermal printer resembling today’s receipt machines to be used in conjunction with the camera), and the Transfer Pak (an adapter that allowed the Game Boy to be connected to a N64 controller to transfer data between systems).

Soon games featuring the usual Nintendo cast (Mario, Samus, Mega Man, Link, etc.) were being sold, as well as portable versions of classics. Other franchises, like the Kirby and Pokemon line of games, began on the Game Boy.

The system was bulky enough that it made it difficult to carry in a pocket unless it was an adult-sized pocket, or a very big kid-sized pocket. But it fit into backpacks easily, however, and kids could take them to school (provided their teachers didn't see them). Later Nintendo would release a slightly slimmer version of the Game Boy that was easier to keep in one’s pocket called the Game Boy Pocket, as well as a front-lit version (but only in Japan).

Other systems competed against the Game Boy, but due to blurry graphics and short battery life (like the Sega Game Gear, for example), the Game Boy dominated, even against color game systems. It was very popular, even among celebrities and some parents. 

It was superseded in 1998 by the Game Boy Color, which featured basically the same sound and graphics level as the original model, but could do color as well without sacrificing battery life and required only 2 AA batteries instead of 4. It also included an IR connection mode to replace the GameLink Cable, but only a handful of games took advantage of this feature. It could display up to 32 colors at once, but what was really interesting was how it was backwards compatible, something no handheld had done up until that point. To celebrate the addition of color, the system was available in six colors colors initially, though some special editions would later be released. 

If a regular game was put into a GBC, it would automatically be colorized (similar to what the Super Game Boy did). But the difference was unlike the SGB, the GBC assigned different colors to background and foreground elements. The default palette (also accessible by pressing UP + A at the startup screen) set the background colors to black/blue/green/white, and the foreground colors to black/red/white/clear (so it looked like 6 colors were used). Other palettes were available (up to 12 different variations) by pressing certain button combinations when the system was booting up. Also, like the SGB, certain in-house games had special palettes customized for them. For example, Metroid II defaulted to a blue background combination while the sprites were all red and yellow. It made the games even more colorful than the SGB, and made them practically just as good as new GBC games.

GBC games were housed in clear plastic that lacked the corner notch that older games had. This mechanically prevented them from being played in a standard GB unit. But quite a few games were made to be cross compatible between both systems. They were shaped like regular games, but featured black plastic instead of gray, indicating that they could be used in both systems. When put into a standard GB unit, it displayed 4 shades of black/white like any game. But when put into a GBC it would display in full color.

Some games (like Link's Awakening) were re-released with a special color version, usually dubbed "DX," for deluxe. Unfortunately, games that had been optimized for the SGB did not have any kind of enhancements when played on a GBC. SGB games would basically behave like a regular type 1 or type 2 game. 

Over 1000 games were made for these two systems, though not all were released in all parts of the world (many were only available in Japan). But it would be replaced by a newer generation of handheld in 2001, the Game Boy Advance. 

My Experience with the SNES

(note: the Gameboy came out before the SNES, but I didn't own one until after I owned a SNES)

I first heard about the SNES in Nintendo Power. I still remember trying to explain some of the details to my mom, who didn’t think it was a good idea because the games weren’t backwards compatible. Later she told me something one of her friends had seen on the news saying that they’d be boycotting the new system because it cost twice as much.

I started saving what I could and could hardly wait. Finally in the end of the summer of 1991, not even a full 2 years after finally getting my NES, I was upgrading. That’s not to say that I completely dumped my old games and hardware. On the contrary, I kept playing them quite often. In fact, on several occasions I traded my SNES with the 1 game for a friend’s entire collection of NES games. But many people sold their entire NES collection for cheap to get money to buy the new and shiny system.

Originally my brother was going to pay for half, since we had a paper route we had been doing together for a few years. He was excited to play Final Fight, an arcade game he liked. But he decided to quit the paper route so I ended up paying for the whole thing myself. Very early on I toyed with the idea of charging a quarter per day for my brothers to play, but that never happened. I saw the SNES display box at K-Mart (probably the only place in town that sold them) at the end of summer, and ended up putting one on layaway in September, and finishing paying it off in October.

I knew of only one other friend who adopted the SNES so early, the one for whom I got the hammer on Zelda II (Jake). But he was often given stuff like that on a whim and didn’t have to earn it so I wasn’t surprised. I had gone to his house to play Super Mario World once to verify that I really wanted one, along with playing the demo at K-Mart. I also got to try out F-Zero and Ultraman. Since I was an early adopter, all of a sudden the tables were turned. Where I had always had to go to friends’ houses to play games until very recently, now they were coming to my house. Friends invited other friends who I only knew in a tertiary fashion, but I didn’t mind; I enjoyed the attention. It was even enough to convince my cousin Drew to stay the night once. Normally my family went over to Boise, and we only had family at our house on certain occasions (like Thanksgiving). We had fun playing Super Mario World, and I also rented Drakkhen, something I had seen my cousin from the other side of the family play on PC. But it didn't really appeal to Drew, so we stuck with SMW. 

One particular memory was when some older boys were in my room and someone asked why even the fireballs in SMW had eyes. The response was, “You’ve got 16 bits. You gotta use them somewhere!” That kinda became a running joke for us. One of my little idiosyncrasies was to insist that the protective plastic sleeves be put on top of the game while it was inserted into the system so they wouldn't get lost. That worked really well for years, but they were all lost when I was in Japan, unfortunately.  

It wasn’t long before stores started renting SNES games. There wasn’t as wide of a selection, unfortunately, and they were more expensive (twice the money for twice the bits, I suppose, even though the games themselves cost the same amount as NES games to buy), so I did it less often. At first I had a harder time finding people to trade games to, so I had to stick to my own library for a while. One thing that was nice about being a little older and maintaining my own game library was that my mom didn't write our last name in permanent marker all over my games when I traded them with friends. 

I bought SimCity, a city-planning simulation that kept me busy for a long time. A funny story about that game is that I was at my friend Michael’s house talking about it with him when his mom heard and asked what game we were playing. We told her and she heard, “SiNCity” (which wasn’t a comic/movie yet) and got concerned until we told her what it really was.  

In the summer of the next year I bought The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past at Toys’Я’Us in Boise, as well as a non-Nintendo Power game magazine that was highlighting it (my subscription had run out by this time). It seemed like it took forever to finish all the errands my mom had to do that day before we started home. I read the manual in the car on the way home, and was dismayed to find my dad playing Tetris in my room, further delaying my playing time. While I waited I went and got Michael who ended up staying the night while we played non-stop until noon the next day.

Michael had wanted to get a SNES, but his dad was against the idea as they had a perfectly functional system already. He would later get a used system and F-Zero without his parents knowing with money from his paper route and kept it hidden (but hooked up) in a desk drawer. Fortunately, they never paid enough attention to notice how much better the graphics/sound were to catch on.

I continued trying to wake up early on most Saturday mornings because that’s when they showed the new Super Mario World cartoon – basically a continuation of what they had before, except now there was Yoshi and cave people. But it often didn’t happen because I stayed up so late the night before, probably playing the SNES. 

We got Contra III: The Alien Wars used from the card shop and played that a quite a lot. I also got the Super Scope, the SNES version of the Zapper. I only ever played it with the 6 mini games that came with it because I never saw any other game that used it. But it was a pain to keep it in batteries since it was wireless. I traded that to an acquaintance for StreetFighter II for a few weeks. Now THAT was a game we played the heck out of. We had tournaments and everything between neighborhood kids where we drew up brackets and fought to the death.

I also got Final Fantasy IV (but it was called Final Fantasy II in the U.S. – long story) for Christmas, and it was a vast improvement over the original. My brothers bought a few games for it as well – sports games that I usually didn’t like very much. I’ll admit I was a little anti-sports at the time, but mostly because I figured one could go out and play soccer or basketball instead of playing it on TV. I did like the games that added fun and/or unrealistic elements, like NBA Jam or Super High Impact Football, but the usual simulators didn’t impress me. One of the constant arguments my brothers and I had was that they would argue that they should be able to play it since it was their game, but my argument was that it was MY system, so good luck playing it without my equipment.

Later I took advantage of the fact that the SNES allowed both the RF jack and the Multi-out to work simultaneously by hooking up the system to a stereo using the RCA jacks. I could get quite a lot of sound output and it was in stereo, which made things nice. The stereo I used was one that mom had won in a raffle, but since she was in charge she read my name. It was more of a mixer board/receiver than a stereo but it worked just fine to enhance my SNES.

I bought a controller, and what I consider to be the best controller ever made for the SNES. It was called the Ascii Pad, and had individual turbo and auto switches for all 6 regular buttons and a “slow” feature. Unfortunately it met its demise at the hands of my brothers who bashed it with their bat controller (a early version of a motion controller).

The other accessory I bought was the Super Game Boy, an adapter that let me play Game Boy games on my SNES and colorize them. More on that in the Super Game Boy section. I also saved up some of my paper route money to buy Mario Paint, but when I went to the store my mom railroaded me into the back of the store instead of the electronics department. It turns out she already had it on layaway and partially paid for. I drew some stuff here and there, but my best work was a Batmobile picture I drew practically pixel by pixel. I recorded some of my better drawings onto a VHS tape by hooking the SNES into the VCR. I still have and use the plastic mouse pad that came with it. The text tools happened to have Hiragana and Katakana on them (the Japanese Alphabet), and I told my friend about it. He apparently got the wrong idea that it was some kind of program for learning Japanese, and since we happened to be in 9th grade Japanese class together, he pestered his mom into buying him a SNES with Mario Paint. After he got it he found out he was mistaken and returned Mario Paint but got other games. Some time later, the mouse stopped working so well. Cleaning the ball (yes, before optical mice were a thing) and the rollers was something I did regularly, but it was the click buttons that weren't working. I took it apart and fixed it by making the purple plastic striker plate of the button a little thicker by simply putting a few pieces of masking tape on the bottom, and it's worked perfectly ever since. 

I bought Final Fantasy VI (FF III in the U.S. – same long story) a few days after Christmas when I didn’t get it as a gift. I put many, many hours into that game. The web was new at that time and I used the local community college’s computers to find FAQs about the game and get weapons and enemy lists and all kinds of information, and probably used a ream of paper printing it all.

Nintendo and RARE found a way to make games look even better, and showed it off with Donkey Kong Country. I was blown away at the realistic motion and textures. I rented the game over Thanksgiving as entertainment for my cousins, and I got quite far but didn’t finish it. Months later at a career fair at the aforementioned community college there was a tent for jobs in programming. As a display they had DKC going, and the presenter was asking for volunteers to play the game. A couple of guys had tried it but didn’t know what to do, and neither did the presenter. By coincidence I happened to enter the tent and everyone immediately started encouraging me to play. I took the controller and flew through the first 3 levels in an impressive fashion, which is what the presenter was hoping to get. I felt like a hero for a couple of minutes. I ended up buying the game used a little while later. 

The other game I bought was Mega Man X3 used from the card shop. Good game, but I ended up giving it to Michael after I was home from Japan because he was a Mega Man collector and had been unable to find that game. I just found out it’s going for like $300 on eBay. Dammit. The only game I have ever sold is Contra III – which I traded to the card shop for the original Legend of Zelda with a manual. I still consider that a good trade. 



I took the SNES and all non-sports games with me when I moved out of my parents' house. I had it hooked up while I lived in Orem, but I probably only played it once or twice, as the N64 was the current system and I had a backlog of games to play at the time. When we moved to Ogden after getting married, I had it hooked up to the 13" TV until we got a bigger 25" TV as a wedding present. When we moved to our condo and got a big screen TV, we moved the 25" TV up to my bedroom and the SNES has been hooked up there until very recently, where it has been replaced with a broken Wii that has the HomeBrew channel. 


In addition to the HomeBrewed Wii, we now have HomeBrewed 3DS systems that can emulate SNES games, as well as the SNES Classic Mini that we got and modified to have more games. 

The Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES)

The Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES) was released in August of 1991 in North America. I think Nintendo would have continued to improve and develop games for the NES and given the 8-bit era a longer life span had there not been competition from Sega and a few other companies. Sega had lost the 8-bit console war and released their 16-bit offering, the Genesis, in 1989, which gave them a nearly 2-year head start into the 16-bit era.

Unlike the Japanese Famicom, the SNES was identical to the Super Famicom other than a few minor cosmetic details in the outer plastic shell. Nintendo’s region locking was easily defeated by simply removing a plastic piece that mechanically prevented games from being inserted, thus allowing Japanese games on an American system and vice-versa.

The system was a very light gray, with a

couple of darker gray spots and purple accents (the Power and Reset buttons). Games were top-loaded into a slot that had a spring-loaded door to prevent dust from getting in when not in use. That plus a few other advances prevented the blinking “Gray Screen of Death.” Unlike the NES, I can only count on a handful of times where a SNES game hasn’t worked correctly. Using my analogy from the NES section on Windows, it’s like comparing how stable Windows XP or 7 is to Windows 95. 

To eject the games, there was a button that acted as a lever to pop the games out of place. Earlier games had a small oval recess in the cartridge, and when the power button was pressed a plastic tab mechanically inserted itself into the recess to prevent the game from being ejected or pulled out during play. Later cartridge design changed the shape of the recess in response to (what I can only guess is) tabs breaking because someone ejected a game forcefully during play and broke something. The new design helped keep the game in, but also allowed for it to be pulled out without breaking if it happened.

The aesthetics of the system were more symmetrical than the

NES, and other than the printed words of “Power,” “Reset,” and “Eject,” the only thing that made the system asymmetrical was the power light on the left side.  The games came with a small hard-plastic cover that only protected the bottom of the game.

Like the NES, the system had two controller ports in the front, and connection ports in the back. The power cord was shaped differently than the NES, but the RF/coaxial jack was exactly the same. Instead of RCA jacks, there was a new “multi-out” jack that was used for TVs with those kinds of hookups which were more common by 1991. Like the NES, the power cord had the transformer on the plug so having the NES and SNES plugged in simultaneously was hard to do, as those two plugs would take up a whole power strip. It was possible to daisy-chain the coaxial inputs, but whichever one was plugged directly into the TV could override the other one.

The redesigned controller was one of the new features of the SNES. The NES controller had 4 buttons if you counted Start and Select, but the SNES boasted 8. The new buttons were X and Y for the thumb, and R and L on the top of the controller for the index fingers. Start and Select were still black and rubber like before, but they were angled to save space. The 4 main buttons (A, B, X, and Y) were set in a diamond pattern which made playing easier because it’s more natural for the thumb to be at an angle than totally horizontal. The result was that B and Y were the two most commonly used buttons. The “dogbone” shape of the controller itself was rounded to feel more comfortable. Instead of the multi-color button design of the Famicom controller, NoA opted to have purple and lavender buttons for some reason. But one thing they did was make X and Y concave while A and B were convex. Supposedly this was to help the player feel the difference between the buttons without having to look down, but in reality very few probably noticed the difference.

There were quite a few graphical, audio, and other technical updates. Graphically, it could show many, many more colors and a lot more simultaneously. More sprites could be utilized without blinking, and having multiple backgrounds and foregrounds was standard. Other effects included transparent sprites, more animation frames, Mode 7 (used on games like Pillotwings or Super Mario Kart for rotating the background), and accurate scaling (zooming in/out). All of these combined together to give the feel and illusion of a more 3-D environment. After getting used to this, I went back and played Super Mario 3 one time and it caught me off guard how flat everything looked in comparison.

Originally the system came with Super Mario World, which was a big selling point. The game added upon ground broke in SMB3 and added Yoshi with a cohesive world where any level could be replayed endlessly and some had multiple exits creating different paths. Later, a smaller, cheaper SNES package could be bought that only included 1 controller and no game giving the consumer the option of buying the game they wanted if Mario wasn’t their thing.

About this time the “Bit Wars” were in full swing. The major players were Nintendo and Sega (and to a lesser extent, Atari), though there were other failed consoles who tried to play (TurboGrafix16, for example). Though Sega had a 2 year head start and had been running on a “Genesis does what Nintendon’t” campaign, the SNES was superior in every way except for pure processing speed. It could display more colors, more simultaneous colors, greater resolution, more sprites, and had a vastly superior sound chip. Sega pushed its greater processing speed in a “blast processing” ad that worked like a charm. Kids didn’t know what that meant, they just knew that the Genesis had it. Looking back, the Genesis console was more aesthetically pleasing and less kiddy looking, had more sports games, didn’t censor violence as much as NoA, and the fact that their boxes were plastic cases were plusses, but in terms of gameplay, controllers, franchises, graphics or sound the SNES was superior.

Later in its life, games like Donkey Kong Country and StarFox

added graphical capabilities that wowed everyone. By comparison, the Genesis had add-ons like the 32X and SegaCD to accomplish what the SNES was already doing. Games like StarFox and Stunt Racer FX had an added on chip that was hard-wired to the game to help with the polygon graphics. Games like Donkey Kong Country used a different technique to make graphics. Rather than draw everything by hand, sprites were created by making animated 3-D models and using flattened versions to make frames. The result is a fairly realistic-looking character with incredibly smooth animation.

Like the NES, there were several controllers available for the SNES. But I think in general fewer were made and sold because most people just used the standard controller. I always thought the standard controller was the best with one exception: the Ascii Pad. It was like a standard controller except that it had separate Turbo and Auto functions for each button as well as slow. The top of it was slightly sloped so reaching the L and R buttons was a little easier as well. Ironically, this controller died at the hands of another controller: a bat controller my brothers bought for their baseball games. I guess while I was in Japan they were playing and one of them hit the Ascii Pad with the bat. RIP, old buddy.

There was also a mouse made for the SNES that came with Mario Paint. As far as I know it only worked with one other game, but it worked great for Mario Paint. The NES came with a Zapper light gun, but the SNES equivalent was called the Super Scope, and it didn’t rely on light gun technology. Instead, there was a sensor that plugged into controller port #2 that was placed on top of the TV, much like today’s Wii remote sensor. It was a bazooka style gun that required 6 batteries, and it came with 6 mini-games to play. There were

a few other games that were compatible with the gun, but none of them were very popular. Most peripherals were and are that way; in fact, the only one that was wildly successful is the guitar from Guitar Hero/Rockband.

Many of the first wave of games were designed to show off capabilities, such as Pilotwings’ scaling, F-Zero’s Mode 7 abilities, and Mario World showed off the colors. The new addition of L and R buttons added different things to different games – screen scrolling for Mario, leaning for better turning in F-Zero, and weapon scrolling for Mega Man X. Later they would become just regular buttons, like the Fierce Punch and Kick buttons for Street Fighter II.

On the bottom of the system was a little expansion port, just like the NES had. It wasn't used outside of Japan, though. Japanese players had the option to buy something called a Satteliview add-on, which let players download games and receive news via satellite radio broadcast. It was a primitive predecessor of today's Wi-Fi connection, and required having the SNES, the Satelliview, and a subscription to the service. A little more on it can be found on the BS-Legend of Zelda information. The expansion port would have also been how a CD add-on would have been used, but the project was canceled and eventually became the Sony Playstation. 

Many of the SNES games were 16-bit updates of older games (essentially remakes) of 8-bit games (Super Offroad, Super Star Wars, and Super Castlevania IV, for example), while others were continuations of past series (Zelda: LttP, Metroid III, Mega Man X, etc.), while others were updates of older games with newer features and rosters, such as sports games. Many of these games perfected their formulas during the 16-bit era. After years of making games for the NES with its limitations, the SNES let platformers shine since they had the superior hardware and years of experience for the programmers to build on.

A few years after being released, Nintendo made the Super Gameboy. It was an adapter to play Gameboy games on the SNES. There were several advantages to doing this, including bigger screen, easier to hold, and adding color. For more details, see the Super Gameboy section.

The SNES was the most powerful console of its generation, and (like its predecessor) the most popular, but it didn’t dominate the way the NES had. The Sega Genesis gained ground on Nintendo from its PR department’s ad campaigns and (mainly) because it was released earlier. It remained the main console until the N64 came out in 1997, even though the Virtual Boy was released in 1996 and died a quiet death less than a year after its debut. 

Additional Resources:

Adam Koralik talks about the 4th Generation of Video Game Consoles.

Adam Koralik talks about the SNES

James (the AVGN) talks about the SNES vs. the SEGA Genesis Part 1 (no language)

James (the AVGN) talks about the SNES vs. the SEGA Genesis Part 2 (no language)

Classic Gaming Quarterly's review of the launch of the SNES.