SNES Games

Nintendo launched the Super Famicom in Japan on 21 November 1990, and the same machine reached North America as the Super Nintendo Entertainment System in August 1991 and Europe the following spring. Inside sat a Ricoh 5A22 built around the 16-bit 65C816 core, running at up to 3.58 MHz — slower on paper than Sega's rival, but wired to far richer graphics and sound. Two picture processors handled eight background modes and could put 256 colours on screen from a palette of 32,768. Mode 7 rotated and scaled a background layer in hardware, which is exactly how Super Mario Kart and F-Zero faked a 3D track years before real 3D hardware. Audio ran on a separate Sony-designed SPC700 with eight sample channels and its own 64 KB of RAM, giving SNES music its warm, sampled character.

What the machine was good at

The SNES is remembered for two things above all: precise 2D platforming and Japanese role-playing games. Super Mario World and Yoshi's Island set the standard for the first, while A Link to the Past and Super Metroid built the template for open, interconnected worlds that games still copy. On the RPG side the console carried Final Fantasy VI, Chrono Trigger, Secret of Mana, EarthBound and Terranigma. Action games were just as strong — Contra III, Super Castlevania IV, Mega Man X and Super Ghouls 'n Ghosts. Cartridges could also carry extra silicon: the Super FX chip inside Star Fox drew filled polygons the base console could not.

Playing SNES games in your browser

Emulation here runs inside the page — nothing is installed and nothing is downloaded to your computer. The catch on this platform is licensing. Most of the 892 SNES titles in our catalogue are still sold commercially by their publishers, so we do not host them; those pages document the game and point to official stores instead. A small number, including Mortal Kombat II and Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3, start directly in the browser. Keyboard controls work out of the box and a connected gamepad is picked up automatically.