Super Nintendo Consoles, Games and Accessories

Nintendo’s second console, the Super Nintendo was released in Australia in 1992, and was so successful on its Wednesday launch in Japan that all 300 000 consoles sold out in hours, and caused enough of a public disturbance that Japan’s government had to ask video game makers to release new titles on weekends. (Nintendo even had to send out new shipments at night time to avoid the Yakuza stealing the new consoles.)

Nintendo’s biggest (and really, only) gaming rival at the time, SEGA had recently released the Mega Drive to combat the popularity of the NES, but despite beginning the most memorable console war in gaming history and introducing a long-standing rivalry between Mario and Sonic fans, the Super Nintendo held off the Mega Drive by relying on third-party developers such as Squaresoft, Konami, Capcom, Enix and Tecmo.

The Super Nintendo was also the home to some of Nintendo’s most famous games – Super Mario World, the Donkey Kong Country trilogy, Yoshi’s Island, Mario Kart, Super Metroid, The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past and F-Zero, to name just a few. It was also possible to play Game Boy games on the TV for the first time by using the Super Game Boy attachment (an achievement that would be replicated with the Game Boy Player attachment for the GameCube and the Game Boy Advance Virtual Console on Wii U), and gamers could create their own works of art or swat bugs with Mario Paint’s special computer mouse-styled controller.

Although strongly pursued (and at times outsold) by the Mega Drive, the Super Nintendo eventually claimed sales victory, selling over 49 million consoles worldwide compared to the Mega Drive’s 40 million before the last console was produced in late 2003.