super nintendo project

Moore, drawing from Bunyan, calls it Mansoul. Blake goes with Eternity, while the Aboriginal Australians call it the Dreamtime. Kabbalistically it’s Yesod. It is the world in which the implications of things are made real, their secret histories and imagined futures stretching into the horizon, ghosts and possibilities not haunting them so much as simply inhabiting them, the ordinary and everyday population of the vast and surreal psychic metropolis. When your children asked you where Mario goes when he’s out of lives, this is what you were afraid to tell them.

The peripatetic pink puffball before us may seem a strange psychopomp, but he’s got prior form, with his sole NES game also post-dating that console’s obsolescence. At least in his early days, this was simply what he did, the Nintendo character who appeared at the end of a console’s life to usher it into this glittering and sunken realm of lost nostalgia. And in a sense he’s the perfect guide to this shimmering realm; he is literally a consumer, eating the dream-creatures around him and taking on their essence and nature. This is, after all, how the mass culture of video games works. For years, it’s what we did. Now here, at the end of everything, he repeats the service.

Ignore the slight twinge of absurdity. That’s simply the state of things, a point John Higgs slyly makes when he uses Super Mario Bros. as his frame with which to explain the famously thorny question of “what’s postmodernism” during his astonishing history of the 20th century Stranger Than We Can Imagine. There is a place you go after you die, and when you get there you are greated by Kirby. He is terrifying to behold, falling into an uncanny valley you didn’t quite realize existed. On the occasions you imagined a video game character physically manifesting before you (and don’t even try to pretend you haven’t done that) you imagined it as a sort of explicitly digital thing – harshly delineated squares hovering in space in front of you, two-dimensional projections into a three-dimensional world. That or Minecraft. Either way, it was 8-bit. You never imagined this.

It’s not the way he’s always facing you even if you try to circle around him. That’s unsettling, triggering a vague sense of motion sickness in your memory of a physical body, but you have a conceptual framework for it from Doom or 3-D movies or the parallax effect on your phone. That’s uncanny, but at least within the domain of what you could imagine. No, it’s the shadow. Inasmuch as you expected him, you expected him to be pink like a raw nerve, pink like a 1 and not a 0, absolute and platonic. But instead there’s a dappled splatter of tincts across his surface, a depth map cast by an imaginary light that clearly does not exist in the space you inhabit.

Also, there are fucking scanlines. Jesus Christ that’s weird.

Still, you understand what you’re looking at even from the inadequate and low-res icon that it projects as its face.…

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One final guest post from Anna Wiggins. Also, just FYI, we’re currently $1 below the threshold for Class reviews on Patreon, so if you were enjoying those, you might want to toss me a buck.

It was always going to end like this. When life transforms into narrative, wyrd into orlog, endings become inevitable, foreshadowed in a way they never were at the time. This is the dread magic of stories. And tragedies, in particular, only ever end one way.

In the Spring of 1998, a fourteen year old trans girl, closeted even from herself, tried to end her life in a patch of woods in rural North Carolina. She had run out of hope, her every refuge invaded. No one came to save her, and she didn’t know how to save herself.

Super Mario RPG was released two years earlier, of course. She never even played it; in retrospect this is surprising. It was a Square-made RPG, manifestly her favorite software developer at this point. But it slipped past her radar, probably by being part of the Mario franchise. Playing it now, I think she probably wouldn’t have liked it. The combat system is turned-based, but with poorly cued proto-quick-time events thrown in. The RPG elements are pretty simplistic: three equipment slots, a handful of stats that monotonically increase, 4-6 magic attacks per character, a shared MP pool. It stays on the shallow end of the RPG pool, and feels more like ‘turn-based Mario’ than ‘Mario-themed Final Fantasy’.

By 1998, her older brother had a Playstation. The SNES was starting to collect dust, unused except for the occasional return to Secret of Mana, Chrono Trigger, or Final Fantasy III. She still preferred the old sprite-based art of the 16-bit era; the character and concept art of Final Fantasy III seeming entirely more palatable than the blocky polygons of Final Fantasy VII. More broadly, though, VII just felt less inviting to her. It had snowboarding and large-breasted characters serving explicitly as eye-candy for boys. These things feel out of place in her vision of what video games ‘for her’ are like.

So it would be facile to suggest that Super Mario RPG destroyed the refuge she had in video games, but it stands as an important symbol, at least. Video games fell distinctly into the categories ‘skill-focused’ and ‘narrative-focused’. RPGs were designed to be narrative-focused. It was ok to be bad at them, because the goal wasn’t to be the best, just good enough to watch the story unfold. Super Mario RPG had more narrative than most Mario games, certainly, but it was still part of a franchise that was solidly in the ‘skill-based’ category, the games her brother and cousins would play and boast about, loudly, to each other. She rejected it on principle. It was an invasion, this RPG from the other side of gaming, from the world of Mega Man and Ninja Gaiden and Sonic the Hedgehog. And arriving as it did at the end of the SNES era, it was like a death-knell for the sorts of games that had sustained her for so long.…

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Hello again. Where are we now, January 1996? Best we start wrapping this up, I suppose.

In a sense I never left, of course. Let’s see. Summer of 1995 was the first year of CTY, the big nerd camp that was the defining social framework of late middle school/early high school for me. Place those three weeks between Civilization and Chrono Trigger. I was still playing video games, but favored the PC – I got a Playstation around the time of Final Fantasy VII, and would get a Nintendo 64 for Christmas at the end of 1996, in my first year of high school, but neither captivated me. I was starting to intellectually specialize – at CTY I’d taken what was basically a college-level intro comp course, and was beginning to think of myself as, if not “a writer,” at least “a guy who could write.” This coincided with the regression of my ability in math, previously my best subject, as the handwriting requirements of algebra and ADD-taxing nature of drilling a problem over and over again made the subject stop favoring me. Indeed, the best paper I wrote at CTY was a descriptive essay about how much I’d hated my 7th grade math teacher. (Meanwhile, I got on quite well with my 7th grade English teacher, and ran into her at the supermarket earlier this year.) From there I’d gradually deflect from aspiring towards fiction to realizing a greater strength in criticism, a bias I’ve yet to correct despite occasional efforts.

But my exile from the Super Nintendo era was short-lived. The summer of 1997 introduced me to the wonders of NESticle, and I dove happily into the suddenly opened archives of my childhood. Then, in the fall of 1998, I got my learner’s permit, and early in 1999 could drive. This being western Connecticut, the main available attraction was the same thing it had been since the 1980s evenings spent with my mother: the Danbury Fair Mall. Or, in my specific case, the Funcoland about a block further down Backus Avenue, where I dove into a more materialist phase of retrogaming by picking up a NES and, not long after, a SNES.

Which is to say that there was a period of my life these games belonged to. Both of them were admittedly on the tricky end. Mega Man X3 was late enough in the SNES lifecycle that it was a relatively rare cartridge that coust upwards of $40 – I didn’t get to it until college when I’m pretty sure I drove upwards of forty-five minutes to a Gamestop that had one. Rockman and Forte, on the other hand, was originally an emulation concern – I remember playing it on the eOne my mother had bought on a lark, which probably means in early 2000. (I remember being baffled by a bug where jumping would simply fail on occasion, which I finally, after extensive testing, traced to the cheap keyboard that shipped with the flagrant iMac knockoff, which was apparently wired so that a particular key combination that was common when playing a side-scroller with the arrow keys would lock out a handful of other keys.)…

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There’s only one way to begin this.

In a sense of course that’s a lie – there’s a vast and multifaceted history of side-scrolling platformers to which Yoshi’s Island was the momentary apex, countless aspects of which could be used as ways into the game. But I mean it simply in the literal sense that unlike its nominal predecessor, Yoshi’s Island does not have any sort of forking path in its initial worldmap, offering a straightforward and unambiguous “first level,” and indeed a wholly linear level structure through the entire game.

This is the difference between it and Super Mario World in a microcosm. The earlier game is a demo of the Super Nintendo – an advertisement for its supposedly infinite potential, and opens accordingly with a choice so as to signify the breadth of what can happen. Yoshi’s Island, on the other hand, exists deep in the twilight of the Super Nintendo, and less than a year before Super Mario 64 transitions the Mario franchise away from the side-scrolling mechanic that had defined it for its first decade. It is not a game about showing off possibility, but rather a late masterpiece – a final demonstration of the form before it passes into history. Its structure is fixed because it demonstrates perfection, not potential.

[Here’s a secret history for you. A retcon to Nintendo’s mascot, a new first adventure for him that predates not only his first discovery of the Mushroom Kingdom in Super Mario Bros., but all the existing prehistory of Mario as a carpenter, cement mixer, and monkey fighter. The already heavily frayed notion that Mario was ever just an ordinary Italian plumber gives way. Now he is always already bound into the history of the Mushroom Kingdom, his battle with Bowser now truly eternal, defining him from the very moment of his birth. His sibling relationship is also now set in stone from the first instant, Luigi always secondary, Mario always the adventuring hero.

But what’s inserted into the narrative is not just Mario’s role as a video game protagonist, but his relationship with Yoshi (like Toad at once a singular character and a species), who turns out not to have been a random dinosaur met at the start of Super Mario World but a guide and protector who has served throughout Mario’s life.]

Is it perfect? Well… no. It’s fun, certainly, and there are some good levels, but it ends up feeling like a collection of one-shot ideas – mechanics that are entertaining for a level (or, more often, a subsection of a level) but that can’t support much more than that. It’s not so much a boutique showcase of levels as a clear-out sale of ideas that were almost good enough for previous games.

In this regard it is also significant that the game is appreciably shorter than Super Mario World, which had 74 levels and 96 total exits to find. Yoshi’s Island has a mere six worlds of eight levels each, all with single exits, along with six bonus levels unlocked if you find all the items within a world, which is a grindy tedium for only the most obsessive of players.…

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There are two other Philips in my family, and both are intimately linked with Doom. My uncle got the game for me – one of his periodic gestures towards doing end-runs around my parents’ rules on media consumption. (The same uncle who got my parents Soulblazer, notably, an amusing case of the opposite process.) He made sure to emphasize the chainsaw, which I appreciated, as it was self-evidently the game’s most brilliantly transgressive option. Come to think of it, he exposed me to Evil Dead 2 somewhere in the vicinity of this too. Heh.

My grandfather, on the other hand, died of Alzheimer’s while I was failing to beat the final boss of Doom 2 one day, my father coming into the computer room and putting a hand on my shoulder until I paused the game and just told me “it’s over,” and all I remember after that is not crying, and then a minute or so later hearing my four-year-old sister start to.

I came back to the game a few hours later, just before bed. I don’t know why I didn’t just quit out – some sort of private and symbolic gesture, I imagine. I died in seconds in any case, screaming, my flesh burning and shredded apart by a Mancubus or something similar. I wonder if that’s a better way to go than Alzheimer’s. It’s more painful, obviously, but it’s also quicker and doesn’t have any awkward moments where your twelve-year-old grandson has to chase you down a busy road and try to convince you that your wife isn’t having an affair with the cleaning lady and that you should probably come home. So a toss-up, I reckon.

This was in 1996, at the start of ninth grade, which was by no means a good year for me. My grades faltered, largely because I couldn’t be bothered to do homework. I went through the worst patch of bullying of my life, and got the dubious honor of being my town’s first victim of cyberbullying. (The school did OK with it, actually, largely because my parents were tenacious as fuck about it.) The incident I remember with the most vividness was blowing up, full out screaming at a science teacher after school. He was an old and grizzled veteran of a high school teacher and just shrugged it off, and I went home and nothing more was said, but I knew then how close I’d skirted to major fucking trouble, and the years since have only made me more glad it was only 1996 and schools still erred on the side of caution with angry young men.

Doom, after all, was at the scene of another death in the 1990s. Fifteen of them, in fact, in Littleton Colorado, less than an hour from where my Uncle Phil lives. The Columbine massacre is a curious cultural moment. It was not the first school shooting by any measure, although it was at the time the deadliest. But the extent to which it captured the imagination is still slightly uncanny in comparison.…

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It’s more than slightly fitting that there should be a haunted Castlevania game. Like most hauntings, of course, Dracula X is ghastly. This was fairly obvious even at the time, when the game got lackluster reviews. Indeed, a new Castlevania game is the sort of thing that could plausibly have gotten me to buy a SNES game in 1995, and certainly could have been good for a rental, except that it appeared in all regards to be a step back from Castlevania IV. No multi-directional whipping, comparatively garish graphics, and in general an approach that looked like it was rejecting all the progress made in the series over the years. And that was beyond stuff like the seemingly pointless and meaningless title. I mean, Mega Man X was one thing, but this was just silly.

And truth be told, it’s a bad game. Most obviously, it’s stupidly difficult, and difficult in fundamentally mean-spirited ways. The most revealing example comes at the start of the second level, which combines a lengthy stretch of crumbling platforms with a chain of Mermen that jump up to attack you, which essentially means that any time you get hit it’s a fatal one. The section’s very early in the level, but the effect is still to make it so that you’re overwhelmingly likely to be down one or more lives when you get to the rest of the level, which isn’t exactly massively forgiving either.

But more than that, there’s just not much to the game. It gives the ugly impression of being shovelware – a Castlevania game rushed out for no reason other than that the Super Nintendo was still the dominant console and there hadn’t been one in a while. Which is almost but not quite what actually happened. In reality Castlevania: Dracula X was nominally a SNES port of Akumajō Dracula X: Chi no Rondo, released on CD for the PC-Engine, the Japanese version of the Turbografx in 1993, and more commonly known in English as Castlevania: Rondo of Blood.

Unlike Dracula X, Rondo of Blood is a good game. For one thing, it’s a sensible follow-up to Castlevania IV. It’s still in a starkly different mould, but instead of feeling like a step backwards it feels like a reasoned and deliberate move in a different direction. Which is perfectly fair – Castlevania IV probably took its approach as far as it was worth taking it. Instead of offering marginal refinement to its predecessor, which at this point simply wasn’t what Castlevania did with its sequels, Rondo of Blood defined its own. Castlevania IV was lushly beautiful and reveled in the possibilities of Mode 7, but was also a relatively slow game. Rondo of Blood, on the other hand, is fast and action-packed – more interested in adrenaline than atmosphere. It also expanded on the handful of secret areas in Castlevania IV and linked them back to Castevania III’s multiple paths structure to create levels with multiple paths and, at times, multiple bosses and exits that lead to different levels.…

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It’s not about changing history; not really. One does change history, yes, but that is not the point, at least in the conventional sense. Normally we change history to alter present circumstances, after all. Here, however, we change history to alter the future, with the present remaining not fixed, but largely conceptualized as a somewhat indifferent midpoint between the two poles – strangely unimportant to the actual story being told.

On the other hand, the apocalypse is set in 1999, which is to say that it was our own impending eschaton – the end of the world we were thoroughly fixated upon by 1995. We’re less than a year out from Doctor Who’s ridiculously and pointlessly millennial American reboot. Bowie was about to launch on tour with Nine Inch Nails to promote Outside, the start (and sole piece) of his millennium-ending superproject. It’s the year that Seven hits, more murderous paranoia piling up in the cultural gutters. The greatest magician of the age is finishing up his diagnosis of the previous century’s grisly denouement, turning his attention to the task of birthing the new aeon. I go to CTY for the first time, the beginning of a genuine realization that yes, I had a tribe, it was just geographically mis-distributed. AOL was in its boom years. It was, in other words, strange fucking days.

The game’s present, meanwhile, is 1000 AD, squarely in the middle ages, which are portrayed as a standard JRPG technological medieval aesthetic – the sort of thing where there are stoves and refrigerators but no cars or airplanes, and the government consists of a hereditary monarchy whose castle is surrounded by a forest full of monsters. There’s both a tomboy princess (water-affiliated and your first healer) and a steampunk inventor (also female, satisfyingly, as is the later prehistoric barbarian). Making up the past is 600 AD, i.e. also the middle ages, portrayed as such in a more traditional European fantasy milieu (by the time the Byronic Magus with purple flowing hair shows up in that timeline the game’s doing enough genre fusion that it doesn’t jar), which is a terribly cute conceit. Rounding out the timestream are a 2300 AD “domes in a radioactive wasteland” dystopia, a 65,000,000 BC “dinosaurs and early humans” set piece, and a late addition of a 12,000 BC timeline that’s basically Atlantis with the serial number filed off. (Which, notably, means Chrono Trigger is a retelling of The Time Monster made by actual Buddhists.)

The relationship between this and our world is strange. It’s modeled on ours without having any particular connection to or relationship with it. It does not seek to reflect any particular concerns with our world. There’s a vaguely ecological bent to Lavos and the destruction of the world, but it’s vague to the point of being essentially contentless. Past that, this isn’t a game that’s about anything as such.

This is mirrored, in a key sense, in its production. It’s silly to try to identify where the notion of the AAA game began – the term arose in the late 90s, yes, but the idea of the tentpole game that’s designed with the clear intention of it being a hit has been around for ages.…

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In case you missed it, “The Blind All-Seeing Eye of Gamergate,” a longform piece on topics closely related to The Super Nintendo Project, went up on Saturday.

At last, the false dichotomy between playing video games and saving western civilization stands revealed. But when we choose to do both at the same time, what exactly is the civilization that we are saving, and how might that shape our understanding of certain larger conceptual wars?

In bluntly materialist terms, which are after all the best way to approach civilization, it is another instance of a PC game getting a fundamentally middling SNES port, in the same vein as Populous and SimCity. There are no doubt those for whom this is “their” Civilization – the version of a monumental piece of video game history. This is the game that inspired Iain Banks to the phrase “outside context problem,” for fuck’s sake. Or, at least, it’s the crummy console version of the predecessor to that game. Certainly that’s where my history here intersects – somewhere past 1996 with a lot of Civ2, in a phase of video gaming otherwise defined by Diablo and Quake. High school, notably, where the Super Nintendo was late elementary school/early middle school.

The games are largely similar – Civilization II refines the original, as opposed to reworking it from the ground up. It’s more balanced and more elegant. This is doubly so when compared to the SNES port – the gap from this to 1996 is in many regards far more shocking than the gap from Donkey Kong Country 2 to Super Mario 64. But the basic thrill of the mechanism and its dizzying central metaphor persists. I compared it to Populous and SimCity earlier, and it really does manage to be a fusion of the two, combining the granular deep systems of SimCity with the cosmological scale of Populous to great effect. You may have had godlike powers in SimCity, but the scale of it was always small – one’s cities fundamentally never felt vast. Civilization feels vast easily, especially in the early stages of the game, which is as it should be. The effect of your initial tiny and contextless patch of land on which you build your capital slowly opening outwards until you encounter the Other, then borders, and finally a coherent world is genuinely effective, making the scope of what you can do feel real and substantive.

But we must be careful here. This sense of progressively illuminating an exterior world is certainly the form of western civilization as depicted here, but it is not the content. We’ve identified the story Civilization likes to tell, but not how it tells it. The answer to that question is inherited from the Avalon Hill board game Civilization is unofficially based upon: a tech tree. This is perhaps Civilization’s most significant not-quite innovation – a sublimely smooth implementation of an interlocking ladder of game upgrades that also serves to create a technologically deterministic narrative of human history from road-building to space colonies.…

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A Guest Post By Anna Wiggins

As any die-hard EarthBound fan will tell you, in Japan EarthBound is called Mother 2, and is the middle of the three-part Mother trilogy. As a child, I just knew that I didn’t like EarthBound very much. The game is full of unpredictable tonal shifts, genre pastiche, self-awareness, and quirky humor, and these were either things I didn’t fully grasp or just didn’t enjoy. Somehow, the game just left me feeling vaguely alienated. Possibly, I just wasn’t ready for it.

Part of this may have been the gameplay, too. The basics are familiar to any JRPG fan: wander around, get into fights, select actions from menus, pray quietly to yourself. But the game is difficult, even by the standards of the day. It falls prey to a lot of common design flaws in JRPGs that raise the difficulty without adding fun. For instance, many enemies summon ‘backup’ occasionally, but with no bounds on how frequently this happens in a single fight, fights can become increasingly resource-draining without bound. Critical hits from enemies are far too common, and respawn rates are high enough to make getting anywhere a slog.

Aesthetically, the game is very distinct. It has cartoony graphics; the character design is frequently compared to Charles Schulz. The battle sequences featured bizarre, abstract backgrounds, a style referred to by the designers as an attempt at creating a “visual drug” experience. The spell effects were likewise highly abstracted, patterns of lines and diamonds that feel almost like sigils. The music direction is some of the best of the era; the soundtrack has an amazing range of styles and moods.

Despite all of this, I didn’t remember much about the game before returning to it. There is one part of the game, though, that left a very strong impression on me, and which more than lives up to my memory: the final battle.

The source of evil and ultimate villain in EarthBound, Giygas, remains an unseen but often-named actor throughout the game. The final battle with Giygas is one of the most deeply unsettling experiences I’ve ever had playing a video game. It takes the game’s underlying “weirdness” and cranks it up until it lands squarely in “uncomfortable.” Even in the battle with him, Giygas remains unseen. Instead, you seem to be fighting reality: Giygas is the wavy, “visual drug” battle screen background itself, and the combat music, both of which are now more sinister than anywhere else in the game. As the fight goes on, and you damage Giygas, the music gets increasingly frantic, the background increasingly angry.

After a short intro sequence, though, the only way to hurt Giygas is via one of the character’s (Paula, the lone girl in the cast, incidentally) “Pray” ability. Throughout the rest of the game, this ability has random (and usually very minor) effects. But now, each invocation of prayer leads to a cutaway scene of the characters you’ve met along the way, each feeling called to pray for you, until the whole planet is praying at once, lending their psychic power to help you.…

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To start, a dyad. The game is based on a double, after all. There is no traditional attract mode. Indeed, almost all of the arcade trappings that defined the platformer’s shift to home consoles are gone, the lone holdout having been the score, kept vestigially in Super Mario World and gone here. And yet the start of the game is all about attraction – a wire-framed Rare logo, followed by an ostentatiously 3-D Nintendo logo.

The content is akin to that of Banzai Bill or the polygonal space ships of Star Fox – a straightforward demonstration of technological prowess. In this case, a clever hack for 3D graphics in which the output of high-powered digital rendering on ultra-expensive Silicon Graphics machines was converted into sixteen-bit sprites in the same way that Mortal Kombat used video and ClayFighter had used claymation figures. The result were the smoothest 3D models in console history.

Unfortunately, it holds up terribly. To a modern eye it looks pixelated and muddy – a bad imitation of the future. It doesn’t help that the computing strength used to render the models here is a sneeze compared to a modern console, or that the design for Donkey Kong here became the new standard, reused all the way to the present day, so that this appears to be a primitive copy instead of a preview of the future.

Next, nostalgia. The old familiar girders, rendered in vivid 3D. An old and wizened monkey sits atop it, turning the crank of a gramophone. The classic music chimes forth, nearly allowed to resolve, when on the last note a boombox drops from the sky, followed by a younger ape long on attitude, who kicks the old man off. The girders transform to trees, and there is rocking out, a shredding guitar remix of the music as the new generation of Kong boogies.

Once again, the message is unmistakable. Not so much a passing of the torch as the law of the jungle, young eating old. This ain’t your father’s goofy monkey. But the choice of history to dethrone is careful. Nintendo didn’t offer just any property out to a British studio that had (by this point twice) impressed with their technical prowess – they offered one that hadn’t had a game in a decade, whose importance to the company was already as the discarded past to their main franchise.

This confluence of technological history and brand history has been present before – consider the way in which the Mega Man series haunted Mega Man X, or the sepia-toned recaps of the previous Metroid games. But it has never been so explicit – the sixteen-bit era literally kicking the decrepit eight-bit era off its chair. Of course, Cranky Kong then blasts his replacement as Donkey Kong with a barrel of TNT, so it’s not quite that simple.

Comparison, then. The best aspect to focus on is the console wars, 1994 having been a strange ceasefire in which Nintendo unexpectedly won the generation because the challengers all vacated the field.…

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