Super Power, Spoony Bards, and Silverware : the Super Nintendo Entertainment System

Author(s)

    • Arsenault, Dominic

Bibliographic Information

Super Power, Spoony Bards, and Silverware : the Super Nintendo Entertainment System

Dominic Arsenault

（Platform studies / Ian Bogost and Nick Montfort, editors）

The MIT Press, 2017

  • : hard

Available at  / 4 libraries

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Note

Includes bibliographical references (p. 203-220) and index

Summary: "While there have been a great many triumphs written about video games (the first game developed jointly by MIT and Harvard; the wild success of Pong at a rather seedy bar in Sunnyvale, CA; the Golden Age of Videogames; and the growing prominence of video games over screen-based entertainment mediums), there of course had to be failures and the Nintendo SNES (Super Nintendo Entertainment System) was the beginning of Nintendo's downfall. This is a book about Nintendo, and how it lived the "16-bit console wars" that saw it go from being the undisputed industry leader in the 8-bit generation of consoles with more than a 90% market share in 1989 to a marginally leading top player with a 60% share of the video game market at the end of the 16-bit console war, and all the way down to its Nintendo 64 selling a little less than one-third as many units as Sony's dominating PlayStation console. (Malik 1997) Ultimately, it is a critical history of Nintendo's fall from grace, from the height of a period I dub th

Contents of Works

  • Introduction: Welcome to the Dark Side
  • Establishing the Nintendo Economic System (NES)
  • Minutes to midnight : devising and launching a platform
  • Now You're Playing with Power of Super Power
  • Beyond Bits and Pixels: Inside the Technology
  • The Race to 3D
  • The American Video Game Renessance
  • The CD-Rom That Would Not Be
  • Conclusion: Silver Linings and Golden Dawns

Description and Table of Contents

Description

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.

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