On Tuesday, Aug. 23, the Super Nintendo Entertainment System turned 25 years old in North America. We here at SB Nation love the SNES, and whether you pronounce it as one word or take it one letter at a time, we’re guessing you do, too. After all, you’re here, and here is where we’re going to celebrate this landmark birthday by talking about a few of our favorite games from the system.
Well, favorite sports games. I didn’t want to tire my editors out by trying to argue that Super Metroid is sports, so some changes in direction had to be made. Still, though, Samus turns into a ball, okay? And there are Space Pirates! Every respectable sport has a team named after pirates.
We’ve included YouTube embeds of a particular theme from each game, so feel free to turn the corresponding song on while reading about the game. You know, for the immersion (video game term).
Street Fighter 2
Street Fighter 2 was cool. Cool kids played it. Nerds played it. The junior high football team played it, and if you practiced enough you could beat a popular jock using Ryu because dude thought Zangief looked cooler.
And you could do this in public, at an arcade! A real world social setting! Where a girl might see and appreciate this prowess!* The 2D arcade fighter culture had a foot in each world; it was the last IRL community for strangers to compete in gaming face-to-face, and also a clear window to the online future.
(*This never happened, to me or possibly anyone)
That’s why the Super Nintendo port was so important — it allowed for unending practice sessions, a perpetual training montage. This was before competitive gaming splintered enough to represent society — bros blowing each other up on Call of Duty while nerds strategize in DOTA. Everyone played Street Fighter 2.
That’s why badgering the shit out of my parents to buy Street Fighter 2 (1992 retail price for SNES: $74.99, that’s $128 in 2016) was a noble effort. It wasn’t a personal indulgence; it was a social necessity, a potential means of championing the outcast lunch table on a level playing field.
None of this happened. Ever. What did happen is that I parroted Capcom’s advertising campaigns and burned three birthdays on three versions of the same. damn. video. game.
Street Fighter 2? Mom bought it.
Street Fighter 2 Turbo? Mom bought it.
Street Fighter 2: Championship Edition? God no, that was for the garbage Sega Genesis. I would never touch a three-button gamepad like some serf.
Remember Super Street Fighter 2? Mom bought it. That one had T. Hawk, who absolutely, inarguably sucked to play as. Yet I parlayed my love of the 1990s Atlanta Braves into T. Hawk’s Native American caricature, because I guess 12-year-old me was a country club racist.
I have fond dumb kid memories of Street Fighter 2 and its various iterations, but none that compare to the manufactured ones, the dreams I was convinced would unfold at some birthday party SNES tournament or Friday night at the arcade. I will die in peace only when, sometime in my fifties, an awful neighbor or condescending personal trainer or car salesman who coaches my kid’s little league team offers to play Street Fighter 2 in front of our wives.
I will absolutely stomp his ass with Guile, get the girl, save the rec center and sit at a better lunch table. — Steven Godfrey
Super Mario Kart
Super Mario Kart is the source of a couple of different important things in my life. Just before I hit double-digit years, it was the first multiplayer game I got into on a level beyond just “Hey, that’s fun.” It also sort of turned me into a competitive monster — not the kind that yells profanities at strangers in online multiplayer, but Kart did give me a focused, single-minded attitude that eventually no longer had an outlet in sports. Kart and video games it is!
Super Mario Kart is the most traditional racing game of the bunch, as the tracks looked the most like race tracks that they ever would, and there was less of a focus on items and fairness. The AI still had that rubber banding technique that many players hate, but that, in a game with fewer items and no blue shell to take out the leader, helped you push yourself further and further until you were wrecking your robo-peers in even the most challenging courses and difficulty with regularity.
That’s also what makes it the most jarring of the Kart games for players who aren’t used to the style of this particular entry: it’s the only one of them my wife refuses to play with me, as my Super Mario Kart muscle memory remains strong, and there’s just not much you can pull from experience with the rest of the series to help you combat that.
It’s the first video game I was able to, on the reg, best my dad in. He would crush me in football games since he knew how the game worked and I was a kid. Baseball was a little harder for him to figure out with some of the controls those early games had for fielding, but he knew how to pitch enough to offset that. Kart, though, was one where we were on an even-ish playing field at first, and then it was off to the literal races, in the sense that I kept playing and playing each day, in cups going for gold or in time trials just trying to defeat Past Marc, and eventually it wasn’t much fun for dad anymore.
Kart is a game that’s helped me bond with strangers, friends and my wife. It’s also a game that became dangerous for me when it introduced online rankings, as I could not stop playing once I noticed where I ranked in North America on time trial courses from the Wii edition — it was that experience with the time trials mode from my youth all over again, except instead of just besting myself and my dad and a couple of friends, it was a large percentage of a continent that I’m embarrassed to even quote here as it will give away just how time I spent with the game. So, uh, I had to stop.
I still play online when the mood hits, just not in time trials. My friends don’t play so much anymore, not since they tried to get me wasted (a successful mission) before playing Kart so they could beat me (a failed one). Even with all the fancy additions to Kart — additions that I adore! — I still go back and play the original when I get the itch for something different. All this time later, it still holds up, and that’s without even getting into how it brings me back to where it all began for me and the series.
Thanks for turning me into a monster, Kart. I’m okay with it. —Marc Normandin
F-Zero
F-Zero was recklessly fast and ugly as shit. It was a launch title for the Super Nintendo in 1990 and like a lot of early video games it reflected the developers’ minds more than the players’. Video games now have perfunctory learning curves. Players are introduced to elements then given a safe space to play with them. In the post-punk days of the SNES, developers were only conscious of what they thought was fun.
In the process, they stumbled on what makes hard games great. For as punishing as F-Zero was, you always felt in control. One mistake wouldn’t kill you, but it would send you careening off scabby-looking barriers, clawing to get traction in the right direction. It made you desperate — almost but not completely hopeless that you could save yourself before your health meter emptied and your vehicle exploded in a little atomic mushroom plop.
It felt legitimately dangerous, especially in contrast to games now. And admittedly, part of the fun of video games is being able to do things you can’t otherwise do without suffering real consequences. I played Super Mario Kart first, for example, and was taught to drive over every yellow chevron booster and never let off the gas. F-Zero toyed with your inclinations. Boosters were just as likely to send you into a 90-degree turn you couldn’t possibly navigate, or a field of landmines that looked like pizzas.
F-Zero shook me, like a child nipped by what looked like a nice dog. When I ping-ponged off the walls I really, truly wanted get back on the road because I was dying, and I couldn’t have wanted it so badly if I didn’t know survival was possible. I felt helpless precisely because I still had that iota of control.
Okay so, please put this on:
That’s the theme song to Big Blue, one of the best video game themes ever and the cause of more Pavlovian stress in my life than anything else.
There was no multiplayer in F-Zero, so the only way to make it a competition was to set the best times in time trial mode. My sister and I always raced Big Blue. We knew exactly what speeds we needed to hit and when, and how far off the wall we could be at each turn to set a course record. We’d trade the controller, one-upping each other, and when a record fell, the pain was real and partly shame, but also terror at having to face Big Blue again knowing it might be hours before you took it back.
Worse was when one of us would beat it while the other wasn’t around. F-Zero didn’t have an initials system, so we memorized our times to the second decimal. Those moments when I turned on the console and those last two digits had changed, I hated my sister. It was pain. And after breaking the record again, it was joy from relief, from no longer being No. 2 and from not having to listen to that glorious theme song that I can no longer stand. Neither my sister nor I remember who broke the record last.
The summer my sister and I were most furiously playing F-Zero, a French cousin of ours was staying with us. To this day, he says what he remembers most is watching us play Big Blue, which doesn’t sound like a good way to spend a summer 4,000 miles from home, but then again my sister and I were a sight. He watched it turn us into irritable, twitchy, paranoid jerks, like I’m sure it did to many. F-Zero made us fear death, then made us die a thousand times in pursuit of an absolute limit we never found.—Louis Bien
NHL ‘94
I was a screwup in high school. I was such a nerd that I overcompensated by being rebellious. I’m sure that no one noticed that I was trying too hard.
Like that, but with fewer toothpicks and more plaque. But something happened to me in my senior year, right around the time when all my friends started being screwups. I started studying. I was involved. I was responsible. I was at school from 7 a.m. to 2 p.m., and after that I’d walk to work for three hours, then head back to school for either football practice or theater rehearsal, I can’t remember which. I’d get home at 10 p.m. usually, and do homework for an hour or two before going to sleep. It was a tough, fulfilling schedule. No idea what I was thinking.
One night, after coming home especially late, my parents called me into their room and gave me a SNES. It wasn’t my birthday. It wasn’t the holidays. It was just positive reinforcement for not being a screwup.
Pretend this is a montage of me taking my SNES to the ice cream parlor, sharing a pair of headphones to listen to the same CD and having a water fight when we’re supposed to be washing the car.
I loved that system. That entire summer, I sat around playing Link to the Past and listening to the first Weezer album, wondering what college was going to be like, man. The album would end, and I’d start it up again. The Ice Palace still ticks me off.
However! We are here to talk about sports on the Super Nintendo, and while hookshotting those weird red-or-blue crawly crystal-ball things is probably sports, there’s only one sports game worth talking about for the SNES: NHL ‘94. I learned everything I know about hockey from that game.
- The only way to score in hockey is by employing “one-timers,” in which you pass to someone camping in the middle of the ice, and every time I watch the Stanley Cup Playoffs, I yell this fact out loud.
- Jaromir Jagr is immortal.
- Offsides is for communists who need rules to feel safe.
- The Anaheim Mighty Ducks is just an awful name for a hockey team.
- The San Jose Sharks were never, ever going to be good enough to win anything.
Even though the Ducks dropped the “Mighty” part from their name, everything else still holds up. And it’s here that I would like to impress upon you the real moral of the story: just how elegant a sports video game has to be to suck in someone who doesn’t know a damned thing about the sport.
I watched 70 or 80 NBA games this past season. I’ve averaged about 40 or 50 since 2000. I’d like to think I know a little bit about the sport, even if I’m not a huge x’s and o’s guy. I wouldn’t go on the radio to talk about it, but I’m okay holding a conversation about the NBA.
Then I got NBA 2K16. It’s ... not a game for beginners. The instructions could be confusing, at times.
Move - Left stick
Jump shot - Hold right stick in any direction (toward hoop for bank shot)
Hop gather - Tap square while standing or driving (left stick determines direction of hop)
Spin gather - Double tap square while standing or driving
OTFC Quick Plays/Offense Strategy -
Mid-air direction change while winking at opponent - Hit the trapezoid button seven times and apologize to nobody in particular
Direct teammate to make car-crash sounds when setting screen - Turn controller upside-down and hum the melody of the first song you learned on guitar
Pretend to take a bite out of the basketball like it’s a big ol’ nectarine - Peel the controller and eat the chocolate hidden inside
It took me five minutes to give up and play Earthbound again. I’m sure if I put 10 or 20 hours into NBA 2K16, it would be fun. I would love to do that! But I do not have time to spend learning controls.
And yet when NHL ‘94 came out, I was hooked instantly. I couldn’t tell a Ray Bourque from a Steve Yzerman, and I still don’t know any of the strategy, but it just might be the most fun I’ve ever had playing a sports game with my friends.
This isn’t to suggest that sports games were better back in my day. It’s just pointing out that sports games were better back in my day. The kids these days, they can take the time to learn all of the controls because they don’t have a job. It wasn’t always like that.
Bless you, SNES. And bless you, NHL ‘94. —Grant Brisbee