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Super Power, Spoony Bards, and Silverware: The Super Nintendo Entertainment System
How the Super Nintendo Entertainment System embodied Nintendo's resistance to innovation and took the company from industry leadership to the margins of videogaming.
This is a book about the Super Nintendo Entertainment System that is not celebratory or self-congratulatory. Most other accounts declare the Super NES the undisputed victor of the "16-bit console wars" of 1989-1995. In this book, Dominic Arsenault reminds us that although the SNES was a strong platform filled with high-quality games, it was also the product of a short-sighted corporate vision focused on maintaining Nintendo's market share and business model. This led the firm to fall from a dominant position during its golden age (dubbed by Arsenault the "ReNESsance") with the NES to the margins of the industry with the Nintendo 64 and GameCube consoles. Arsenault argues that Nintendo's conservative business strategies and resistance to innovation during the SNES years explain its market defeat by Sony's PlayStation.
Extending the notion of "platform" to include the marketing forces that shape and constrain creative work, Arsenault draws not only on game studies and histories but on game magazines, boxes, manuals, and advertisements to identify the technological discourses and business models that formed Nintendo's Super Power. He also describes the cultural changes in video games during the 1990s that slowly eroded the love of gamer enthusiasts for the SNES as the Nintendo generation matured. Finally, he chronicles the many technological changes that occurred through the SNES's lifetime, including full-motion video, CD-ROM storage, and the shift to 3D graphics. Because of the SNES platform's architecture, Arsenault explains, Nintendo resisted these changes and continued to focus on traditional gameplay genres.
This is a book about the Super Nintendo Entertainment System that is not celebratory or self-congratulatory. Most other accounts declare the Super NES the undisputed victor of the "16-bit console wars" of 1989-1995. In this book, Dominic Arsenault reminds us that although the SNES was a strong platform filled with high-quality games, it was also the product of a short-sighted corporate vision focused on maintaining Nintendo's market share and business model. This led the firm to fall from a dominant position during its golden age (dubbed by Arsenault the "ReNESsance") with the NES to the margins of the industry with the Nintendo 64 and GameCube consoles. Arsenault argues that Nintendo's conservative business strategies and resistance to innovation during the SNES years explain its market defeat by Sony's PlayStation.
Extending the notion of "platform" to include the marketing forces that shape and constrain creative work, Arsenault draws not only on game studies and histories but on game magazines, boxes, manuals, and advertisements to identify the technological discourses and business models that formed Nintendo's Super Power. He also describes the cultural changes in video games during the 1990s that slowly eroded the love of gamer enthusiasts for the SNES as the Nintendo generation matured. Finally, he chronicles the many technological changes that occurred through the SNES's lifetime, including full-motion video, CD-ROM storage, and the shift to 3D graphics. Because of the SNES platform's architecture, Arsenault explains, Nintendo resisted these changes and continued to focus on traditional gameplay genres.
240 pages, Hardcover
Published September 1, 2017
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
October 24, 2017
This quirkily-titled exploration of the rise and fall of the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES) will fascinate if, like me, you sit at the intersection of being interested in computing, gaming and business.
Once I had got over a few sniggers at the idea that game studies/platform studies could be an academic discipline, about which you can write a serious academic work with Harvard referencing and everything, I found this a genuinely fascinating book. I was never a SNES user - I made the transition from an earlier console (Mattel's Intellivision) to a Commodore 64, Amiga and then PCs for gaming - but it was impossible to be unaware of it during its heyday from the late 80s.
It seems that the SNES is generally looked back on with awe by those who were fans at the time, but Dominic Arsenault brings a more balanced view, pointing out the technical and business limitations of the product - all driven by a business philosophy at Nintendo which relied on locking players and developers into a 'walled garden'. He shows how Nintendo resisted the innovations, such as CD-Rom that were transforming gaming and how its difficulties in deviating from a 'family friendly' approach caused it pain.
I found all the components that made up the SNES story genuinely interesting - Arsenault does a good job of covering the technology (I hadn't realised that to overcome the limitations of the SNES's cheap and cheerful processor, some of the game cartridges contained more powerful CPUs than the console), the oddities of the graphics modes and the impact of the introduction of 3D (not through glasses, but games which had apparent depth of field). Particularly interesting with a business hat on were Nintendo's tactics of using last-generation tech to keep things simple and of putting games developers through many hoops to have the honour of writing for them - as opposed to the far more open platforms that would follow.
There were a few things that could have been better. The opening section is a little repetitive. Sometimes Arsenault seems more interested in scoring an academic point that informing the reader. We could have done with more illustrations (ideally in colour). And I think it's shortsighted to only give context from other console platforms. As it is made clear in the book, computer games, particularly once PCs became equipped to handle them, did a lot of the driving in the early 90s (think Doom or 7th Guest, for example) with the consoles scrambling to keep up. As far as potential gamers were concerned there wasn't a clear divide between computers and consoles, and it doesn't make sense to avoid the computer rivals when putting the SNES in context.
Overall, though, despite this not trying to be anything other than an academic title, if you sit in that overlapping part of the Venn diagram like me, that combination of period game technology (just the mention of sprites gets me excited), hardware developments and the business practices of Nintendo and their rivals makes for a surprisingly riveting read.
Once I had got over a few sniggers at the idea that game studies/platform studies could be an academic discipline, about which you can write a serious academic work with Harvard referencing and everything, I found this a genuinely fascinating book. I was never a SNES user - I made the transition from an earlier console (Mattel's Intellivision) to a Commodore 64, Amiga and then PCs for gaming - but it was impossible to be unaware of it during its heyday from the late 80s.
It seems that the SNES is generally looked back on with awe by those who were fans at the time, but Dominic Arsenault brings a more balanced view, pointing out the technical and business limitations of the product - all driven by a business philosophy at Nintendo which relied on locking players and developers into a 'walled garden'. He shows how Nintendo resisted the innovations, such as CD-Rom that were transforming gaming and how its difficulties in deviating from a 'family friendly' approach caused it pain.
I found all the components that made up the SNES story genuinely interesting - Arsenault does a good job of covering the technology (I hadn't realised that to overcome the limitations of the SNES's cheap and cheerful processor, some of the game cartridges contained more powerful CPUs than the console), the oddities of the graphics modes and the impact of the introduction of 3D (not through glasses, but games which had apparent depth of field). Particularly interesting with a business hat on were Nintendo's tactics of using last-generation tech to keep things simple and of putting games developers through many hoops to have the honour of writing for them - as opposed to the far more open platforms that would follow.
There were a few things that could have been better. The opening section is a little repetitive. Sometimes Arsenault seems more interested in scoring an academic point that informing the reader. We could have done with more illustrations (ideally in colour). And I think it's shortsighted to only give context from other console platforms. As it is made clear in the book, computer games, particularly once PCs became equipped to handle them, did a lot of the driving in the early 90s (think Doom or 7th Guest, for example) with the consoles scrambling to keep up. As far as potential gamers were concerned there wasn't a clear divide between computers and consoles, and it doesn't make sense to avoid the computer rivals when putting the SNES in context.
Overall, though, despite this not trying to be anything other than an academic title, if you sit in that overlapping part of the Venn diagram like me, that combination of period game technology (just the mention of sprites gets me excited), hardware developments and the business practices of Nintendo and their rivals makes for a surprisingly riveting read.
January 23, 2019
A shallow discussion of the SNES's hardware (it was a relatively boring hardware platform), a too-short overview of how a handful games used its mode 7 (the only really notable thing about it) and the obliquely mentioned Super FX line of coprocessors some cartridges used, couched in one part insufferable prose (save us from fake Middle English and the word ``ludic''), one part academic media criticism at its most masturbatory (endless citations to define genuinely trivial concepts), and three or four parts unremarkable video game history of the kind we've all heard a thousand times before. There's also a discussion of the SNES CD-ROM that, while obviously irrelevant to any platform-studies view of the SNES, could have been interesting, given that the book post-dates the discovery and tear-down of the only known prototype, but actually just repeats information that was already public knowledge before then.
If you have a particular attachment to the SNES and haven't already read one of the hundreds of other Nintendo histories that have been written, there are worse way to fill a few hours, but there's little to set Super Power, Spoony Bards, and Silverware apart.
If you have a particular attachment to the SNES and haven't already read one of the hundreds of other Nintendo histories that have been written, there are worse way to fill a few hours, but there's little to set Super Power, Spoony Bards, and Silverware apart.
March 24, 2023
This book is written at the level of a college paper with lots of footnotes, citations, etc. There are even some sections of chapters that get into some heavy terminology that didn't really mean anything to me. But overall, I found the book to be written in a very approachable way.
What was incredibly fascinating to me was that, given my age, I lived through the NES -> SNES transition. I remember all the commercials and the rivalry with Sega. I remember wondering why some arcade games were way better on the Sega Genesis. I remember being incredibly impressed with late-era SNES games like Super Mario RPG and Donkey Kong Country. And I remember strange translations, but not knowing why they were so strange.
This book explains the behind-the-scenes look as to why I had those experiences. And, unlike most books about the era, it doesn't hold Nintendo up as perfect. While the author doesn't hate Nintendo or treat them unfairly, the author does treat them critically. Calling them out when they are being stubborn or shooting themselves in the foot.
If you can get past the technical prose and are a gamer somewhere between 35 and 50, you will probably also find this book incredibly fascinating, too.
What was incredibly fascinating to me was that, given my age, I lived through the NES -> SNES transition. I remember all the commercials and the rivalry with Sega. I remember wondering why some arcade games were way better on the Sega Genesis. I remember being incredibly impressed with late-era SNES games like Super Mario RPG and Donkey Kong Country. And I remember strange translations, but not knowing why they were so strange.
This book explains the behind-the-scenes look as to why I had those experiences. And, unlike most books about the era, it doesn't hold Nintendo up as perfect. While the author doesn't hate Nintendo or treat them unfairly, the author does treat them critically. Calling them out when they are being stubborn or shooting themselves in the foot.
If you can get past the technical prose and are a gamer somewhere between 35 and 50, you will probably also find this book incredibly fascinating, too.
July 12, 2024
This academic assessment of the SNES was a mostly enjoyable read. The best parts cover the technological aspects of the console and explore the rhetoric surrounding the SNES, its marketing, and its press coverage. At times the academic-ness of the writing (with its meandering sentences and unnecessarily oblique wording) gets hard to wade through, and some of the author’s invented terminology (e.g., NES standing for the “Nintendo Economic System”) elicits eye rolls, but the style grew on me a little by the end. Overall, this was a pretty insightful look into Nintendo as a company and why, though the SNES is remembered very fondly, the company’s closed, secretive, proprietary nature caused a decline lasting from the mid-1990s to the early 2000s.
November 28, 2018
I was a little hesitant about this. I've read so many books about the early days of the gaming industry there are only so many ways to tell the same stories. This one is a bit different in that's it's like an academic paper complete with quotes and references. That did mean it didn't flow as well as other books on the same topic but it made for an interesting read. It's central premise is that the SNES isn't the massive success most people consider it to have been and argues this from every possible angle. I don't quite agree but it was enjoyable looking at it from a different viewpoint
May 15, 2018
This lacks the hardware and software deep-dive chapters of I Am Error, so it isn't a good complementary work to online resources for making a homebrew SNES game, but it is interesting and can serve as inspiration.
I was surprised to learn that many major games besides StarFox leaned heavily on extra processing power packaged within the cartridges, that some scaling effects weren't native 'Mode 7' but came afterwards.
The peritext vs. epitext section should be eliminated.
I was surprised to learn that many major games besides StarFox leaned heavily on extra processing power packaged within the cartridges, that some scaling effects weren't native 'Mode 7' but came afterwards.
The peritext vs. epitext section should be eliminated.
May 7, 2019
These "Platform Studies" books continue to be a let-down with only the most minimal content of interest, particularly technical content, and they seem (especially with this entry) given to a lot of academic puffery. The Future Was Here: The Commodore Amiga continues to be the high water mark that the other books refuse to live up to.
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January 15, 2019some good history in here ofc. not really on board with his downplaying of the ways developers used mode 7 though. reminded me a bit of older game studies writing that de-emphasised visuals over, uh, rules or ergodicity or w/e.
the breakdown of snes / expansion chip hardware is a highlight tbh
the breakdown of snes / expansion chip hardware is a highlight tbh
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews