20 Things You DIDN'T Know About The SNES

20 Things You Didn’t Know About The SNES

Welcome to MojoPlays, and today we are looking at the definitive console of the early 90’s, and seeing if there’s still anything we haven’t learned about these little plastic bundles of joy. These are 20 Things You Didn’t Know About The SNES. Let’s go.

Don’t Rest a Drink On Me

The American version of the NES had a “distinct” design, which is polite code for “so boxy it could double as a footstool,” because Nintendo of America decided to style it like a VCR to avoid scaring retailers still traumatized by the great video game crash, the plan worked, but the design also came with one glaring flaw, a perfectly flat top that begged people to put drinks on it, inevitably leading to countless consoles drowning in grape Fanta. So did you know that when Nintendo designed the "SNES", they made sure the new system was basically anti-beverage. A top-loading cartridge slot, a raised and curved surface, and an overall shape that whispers “please don’t use me as a coaster.” It sounds like an old wives tale, but turns out it’s true!

In Trouble with Congress

In the early 90’s, Nintendo smugly assumed they were safe from violence concerns thanks to turning Mortal Kombat’s blood into what looked like red Gatorade-flavored sweat, but they underestimated two things: Sega’s ability to be petty and Congress’ ability to get offended by absolutely anything, because during a hearing, Sega VP Bill White decided to drag Nintendo into the fire by whipping out the "Super Scope", a bazooka-shaped plastic peripheral so gloriously over-the-top that Lieberman immediately declared it looked “like an assault weapon,”. This was because SEGA was in trouble and was trying to draw focus elsewhere... Dogs.

They DO Turn Yellow

As it turns out, Nintendo accidentally overloaded early units of the SNES with flame-retardant chemicals containing bromine, a metal that loves oxidizing so much it basically speedran discoloration, and while later versions fixed the issue, anyone who bought one near launch now owns a console the exact shade of “nicotine chic,” but on the bright side, if your house ever bursts into flames, your Super Nintendo will bravely refuse to ignite while you heroically continue playing Super Metroid in a haze of smoke and poor life choices.

Nintendo Avoid The Yakuza

There isn’t much I’m eager to say about the Yakuza, they’re scary, which is why Nintendo once worried the local syndicates might try to swipe an incoming shipment of highly coveted "Super Nintendo" units. This fear led to the creation of the magnificently dramatic “Operation Midnight Shipping,” a title that sounds less like a logistics plan and more like something you’d whisper to yourself at 3 a.m. after panic-ordering 50 tea towels on Amazon, but despite the cool name, the operation’s big strategy was simply “deliver everything ridiculously early in the morning,” getting consoles, and copies of Super Mario World to stores before any hypothetical gangsters wake up.

SNES Had Online Features

The SNES’s big attempt to join the online world came in the form of "XBAND", think of it as the proto–Nintendo Switch Online, except held together with hope, phone lines. Designed for both SNES and Sega Genesis users, the XBAND let players battle friends online, download newsletters, and even check email, which in the ’90s basically made it a wizard box, and though it peaked at around 15,000 subscribers and even teamed up with the Sega Channel for a bit, it ultimately shut down in early 1997.

Only came out as revenge

As popular as the SNES turned out to be, Nintendo wasn’t exactly dying to replace the NES at first, I mean if your device reignited an entire industry you’d have a good amount of confidence in it as well. They figured the little grey box would keep selling forever as a permanent family-room resident, but Sega backed Nintendo into a corner with an aggressive marketing campaign that basically pointed at Nintendo and yelled, “Hey, old man!” so Nintendo eventually realized they had to clap back, announcing the "Super Famicom" in 1987. They only made it, because SEGA was strutting a bit too hard.

Earthbound’s Anti-Piracy Prank

Most games with anti-piracy measures just stop you dead the moment they detect funny business, but "Earthbound" went full chaotic evil. If the console detected a pirated copy of the game, it massively ramping up enemy encounters, and if you somehow muscled through that gauntlet and made it all the way to the final showdown with Giygas, the real trap sprung: the game would suddenly crash, forcing a reset, at which point you’d discover that every single one of your save files had been vaporized, leaving you with nothing but existential dread and a very strong respect for Nintendo’s commitment to teaching pirates life lessons.

SNES Bundles

There hasn’t been a console since that packaged SO many games with the console to make different types of bundles. Obviously the big one was the Super Mario World bundle, as you’ve probably seen it 10,000 times on EBay. Early bundles included "F-Zero", and later "The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past" got its own set once it dropped a year after launch. There were also bundles revolving around Super Mario All-Stars, Donkey Kong Country, Super Mario Kart, Street Fighter II, Yoshi’s Island, Star Fox, Killer Instinct, Mario Paint, Kirby Super Star, Tetris Attack, Ken Griffey Jr. Presents Major League Baseball, and Super Metroid. I actually could have kept going, but I’m stopping there for your sake.

A Lot of N64 Games Started as SNES Games

Nintendo managed to keep the Super Nintendo alive and kicking far longer than anyone expected by stuffing special performance-enhancing chips right into the cartridges themselves, letting the system pull off jaw-dropping feats like Star Fox’s polygonal madness and Yoshi’s Island’s wild visual wizardry, and this trick worked so well that Nintendo briefly considered pushing even more ambitious 3D projects onto the SNES. “Super Mario 64” originally started life as a SNES concept, “Star Fox 64” borrowed ideas from the unreleased “Star Fox 2”, and Rare had an early SNES-based 3D project called “Project Dream”, which eventually transformed into “Banjo-Kazooie”.

Backwards Compatibility Almost Happened

Did you know that the SNES was originally supposed to play the entire NES library straight out of the box? It’s true, it would have been a feature that would’ve made revisiting classics a breeze, but Nintendo, true to form, never fully committed to backward compatibility outside of the Wii-era, partly because their hardware kept bouncing between cartridges, tiny discs, big discs, and then cartridges again like a company playing “console format roulette,” and while the idea likely surfaced as a response to Sega and the PC-Engine boasting their own compatibility perks, Nintendo ultimately scrapped the plan once they realized it would jack up the SNES’s retail price.

The Rarest SNES Cartridge

Back in the 90’s, Nintendo organized a giant SNES competition tour to crown the ultimate champion, and instead of forcing staff to swap game carts nonstop like overworked DJs, they built a single special cartridge containing timed demo-style segments of three different games, giving each contestant roughly six minutes to rack up the best overall score. Only about 33 of these multi-game cartridges existed during the tour, most of which Nintendo later scrapped for parts, leaving only two known surviving copies in the wild today, both so rare they sell for the kind of money that makes collectors consider different hobbies.

The Ghost of Sheeva

"Mortal Kombat 3" originally shipped with 15 playable fighters, and when "Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3" hit the scene, it slapped on a handful of extra characters, but the SNES didn’t exactly have room to store the entire violent circus, so the developers had to start trimming the fat; several stages vanished, voice clips were axed, Animalities got the boot, and even poor four-armed Sheeva was cut to make space for all the new goodies, though “cut” is a generous term because instead of deleting her completely, they only removed her graphics while leaving everything else in the code, which becomes a problem thanks to a secret 8-vs-8 endurance mode that allows the player to select random characters, meaning you can accidentally end up choosing Sheeva—or whatever abstract art piece is standing in for her that day; her moves still function, her hitboxes still exist, but visually she shows up as a chaotic soup of pixels.

SNES Doesn't Care What You Think

Tool-assisted speedruns are usually delightful chaos, letting you watch someone absolutely annihilate games that once destroyed your childhood confidence, sometimes by exploiting glitches so wild they feel illegal. But the greatest Tool-assisted speedrun ever created is the legendary "Family Feud" SNES playaround, because that game has an unbelievably goofy answer-checking system where you don’t need to type the exact answer, just a string of letters that contains the correct answer’s letters in order, even if you stuff it full of nonsense in between, and thanks to that loophole, you can blast out answers much quicker!

Sequel to Link to the Past

As it turns out, there really is a hidden sequel to "The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past" that most players never knew existed; set several years after the original SNES classic, it has you once again playing as Link, this time hunting down the titular Ancient Stone Tablets while also learning more about the younger brother of a major NPC from the first game. Why didn’t we get it? The entire game was delivered through "Satellaview" broadcasts and could only be played in one-hour chunks during specific scheduled times, and while a shockingly accurate reconstruction has been pieced together from recovered memory-pack data, the true original experience, complete with timed episodes and live audio, can never be fully recreated.

Cloud Gaming Before The Cloud

Oh! Speaking of. Let’s break down "Satellaview" a bit more. “Satellaview” was an add-on that let the system receive and decode satellite TV signals so you could literally tune into games like TV shows; titles were broadcast at specific times, streamed directly to your console, and once the hour-long window ended you had to stop playing. Nintendo created a bunch of Satellaview-exclusive games, and the "Satellaview" was actually pretty successful, staying supported by Nintendo and their broadcasting partner from 1995 all the way until 2000, proving Nintendo was experimenting with cloud gaming long before anyone had the bandwidth for it.

PlayStation Started As An SNES Add-On

Yes, the mighty PlayStation was originally Nintendo’s own half-baked baby, because back in the late ’80s, Nintendo and Sony teamed up to make a fancy CD add-on for the "SNES", and everything was going great until Nintendo actually read the contract and discovered Sony would get most of the profits from CD-based games, which instantly triggered Nintendo’s “absolutely not” reflex; so in true dramatic fashion, literally hours after publicly announcing their partnership with Sony, Nintendo spun around, plunged a metaphorical knife straight into Sony’s metaphorical back, and told the world they were dumping them for Philips. If you know anything about the Philips CD-I... You know this was an epic mistake.

Super Arcade Nintendo

Back in the ’80s and ’90s, arcades were still thriving like neon-lit ecosystems full of teenagers, cigarette smoke, and the constant sound of coins clinking, even though home consoles were taking over living rooms worldwide. Nintendo wasn’t ready to give up that sweet arcade money, that meant launching the gloriously obscure "Nintendo Super System" in 1991, a machine so unpopular that even Bigfoot has better name recognition, with estimates suggesting only about 1,200 units were ever sold, a microscopic number compared to other cabinets.

Mario Kart vs F-Zero

This is a fun piece of gaming trivia: Without "F-Zero", we wouldn’t have "Mario Kart", because Mario Kart originally began as an attempt to make a multiplayer version of F-Zero’s high-speed, futuristic chaos. Takaya Imamura, the artist behind Captain Falcon himself, recently said in an interview that a new F-Zero would cost a fortune to make, while Mario Kart continues printing money faster than Nintendo can count it, so from a business standpoint, F-Zero is basically standing outside the Mushroom Kingdom holding a cardboard sign that says “Will race for budget,” and Nintendo just keeps walking; the irony, of course, is that Mario Kart only exists because Nintendo wanted to adapt F-Zero.

The Original SNES Mascot

Captain Falcon is a man of many talents, galactic hero, bounty hunter, racecar driver, professional martial artist who fights like he’s being paid per explosion, but his original job was supposed to be way cushier, and maybe involving a red hat: he was meant to be the official mascot of the "Super Nintendo Entertainment System", complete with a gray color scheme to match the console, because nothing says “buy this system” like a mysterious helmeted man who looks like he moonlights as a traffic cone; eventually Nintendo realized "F-Zero" needed a recognizable face more than the SNES needed a space cop spokesmodel, so Falcon got recolored, repurposed, and shoved into a hovercar at Mach 7.

Disrupted Society

In Japan, the "Super Famicom" launched on a Wednesday, and the results were absolute chaos. The Super Famicom’s release was such a cultural earthquake that the Japanese government straight-up intervened, realizing that having the entire population lining up on a weekday just to sprint home and play the living soul out of Super Mario World was, uh, slightly disruptive to society, so officials politely insisted that all future consoles be released on weekends, a rule that continues today. Bastards. I don’t want kids getting in my way for the PS6.