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.