Super Nintendo

In the mid-1980s, as the NES dominated the global market with over 90% share in Japan, a team of engineers led by Masayuki Uemura began working on its successor. The "Super Famicom" project had to be powerful enough to justify abandoning the best-selling platform, without alienating developers with overly complex hardware.

The challenge was titanic. Sega had launched the Mega Drive in 1988, and the "Genesis does what Nintendon't" campaign was eroding Nintendo's market share in North America. Nintendo's response was an engineering masterpiece: the 16-bit Ricoh 5A22 processor, a PPU handling 256 simultaneous colors from 32,768, and crucially the Sony SPC700 audio chip, designed by Ken Kutaragi — the same man who would later create PlayStation.

Mode 7, capable of rotating and scaling entire backgrounds in real-time, became the console's calling card. F-Zero used it to simulate 3D circuits, Super Mario Kart for racing tracks, and Pilotwings for acrobatic gliding. It was pure magic for anyone coming from the NES.

The SPC700 chip was a story within a story. Ken Kutaragi developed it secretly, without his Sony superiors' approval. When the Nintendo-Sony partnership for the "Play Station" — a CD-ROM reader for the Super Famicom — collapsed in 1991 over rights disputes, Kutaragi used that experience to convince Sony to enter the console market independently. The chip giving the SNES its magical audio was the seed that generated Nintendo's greatest rival.

The Super Nintendo launched in Japan on November 21, 1990, selling 300,000 units on day one. It reached North America in August 1991. The library built over its 13-year lifespan is unanimously considered among history's finest: Super Mario World, Zelda: A Link to the Past, Chrono Trigger, Final Fantasy VI, Super Metroid, Donkey Kong Country — titles that defined entire genres.

With 49.1 million units sold, the SNES didn't match NES numbers, but its average title quality remains unsurpassed. It's the console that proved gaming could be art.