SNES Turns 20 Today (In The UK)

In a year that saw the formation of English football's Premier League, the celebration of the Queen's Ruby Jubilee and, most illustriously, Party Politics becoming the tallest horse to win the Grand National, the United Kingdom was graced by the launch of the Super Nintendo video game console.

The SNES was released in the UK in November 1990, almost 18 months after it's launch in Japan as the Super Famicom. It gave rise to some of gaming's indelible classics, including Super Metroid, Super Mario Kart and Super Mario World. It also made it cool to prefix just about every game title with the word "super". Super.

Man, watching this ad makes me I wish I was born in 1980.

Sadly I have not had the fortune of playing the SNES- at 21 years of age, I turned two in November 1992 and remember nothing about it from the time. The first ever games console I ever owned and played was the SNES's arch nemesis, the Sega Mega Drive, which, while released two years earlier in the UK, was bought for me used some six years later.

However, the SNES was hugely successful, gave millions of people millions of hours of gaming joy, and ended up selling over 49 million units.

So here's to the Super Nintendo- may it live long in the memory... and may I get to actually play one some day.


Note: at the end of the above SNES commercial, notice how the console WITH A GAME costs only £150? How times have changed...