The 16-Bit Wars

1988–1995
  • SNES · 7

The story

Sega’s Mega Drive, sold as the Genesis in North America, took on Nintendo’s Super Nintendo: the first true console war, fought with mascots, adverts and playground arguments. Sonic the Hedgehog (1991) gave Sega a star of its own.

Street Fighter II (1991) started a boom in fighting games. Mortal Kombat (1992) and its violence led to hearings in the US Congress, and in 1994 to the ESRB, the board that rates games by age in North America.

The games at this station are new. Homebrew developers still write for these machines today, and every game here is shared by its author under an open licence.

Generation
Fourth
SNES CPU
Ricoh 5A22, a 65C816 core at up to 3.58 MHz
SNES screen
Usually 256 × 224, 256 of 32,768 colours at once
SNES sound
Sony SPC700, eight sampled voices