The Super Nintendo was the 16-bit successor to the NES. It featured a 16-bit 65816 CPU, excellent stereo sound (designed by Sony) and built-in hardware scaling and rotation. Mario Bros for the NES was a huge success and the SNES sequels followed the trend. Super Mario World and Super Mario Kart were both standouts. Other must-have games include Chrono Trigger, a great role playing adventure game and Street Fighter II, based on the ultimate 2-D arcade fighting game. When both Sega and NEC released CD-ROM add-ons for their systems, Nintendo countered with a 32-bit CD-ROM add-on of their own. As history would have it, the SNES CD-ROM was never released (vaporware?) when Nintendo's partnership with Sony broke up. (Sony, however, continued working on the CD-ROM project and this eventually evolved into the PlayStation, but that's a story for another page.) Although the lack of speed of the processor the games were superior compared to the Megadrive(The main rival). Some games that needed the extra speed, came equiped with custom chips(DSP & FX). Resulting in the smash hits Mario Kart(DSP) and Starwing(FX)

The SNES incorporates a feature called Mode 7 that enabled features such as Scaling and Rotation. One of the first games to utilize both of these features was the game Pilotwings. For example, in the skydiving levels as the player plummets towards the Earth, the ground is scaled to give the appearance the player is falling. In addition, as the player moves the background is rotated to give the effect of movement. Nintendo used carbon-boxes to package their games(nes, snes, n64) which was inferior compared to the hard-cases Sega used. Finding games in mind boxed condition is very difficult.