SNES Games That Were Way Ahead of Their Time

Nintendo’s gamble on the SNES would pay off majorly, ushering in a whole new wave of innovative titles, moving the game industry forward, and solidifying the concept of console “generations” right as the company’s race against Sega was heating up and the video game market had bounced back in North America. Accordingly, the Super Nintendo Entertainment System would be a console for the ages, packed with a slew of incredible titles in its library that defined gaming both in the era and beyond.

When it comes to consoles with games way ahead of their time, few can stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the SNES, as many of its best titles either offered up something like players had never experienced or even created their own genres or subgenres of gaming. In some cases, the SNES’ most forward-thinking games are still inspiring developers today and serving as the benchmark for a particular style of gameplay.

• Release Date — August 27, 1994
• Developer — Ape Inc., HAL Laboratory
• Publisher — Nintendo
• Genre — JRPG
• Review Aggregate Score — 81% (Generally Favorable)

For a game to be “ahead of its time”, it needs to offer something new, be underappreciated by a contemporary audience, or both. One SNES title that checks all those criteria is Earthbound, which is one of the system’s best RPGs and a game that went criminally overlooked at the time of its release. While today we see Earthbound‘s influence pop up all over the place, especially in modern classics like Toby Fox’s Undertale, it was incredibly unconventional in 1994. A JRPG set in a modern, everyday setting with plenty of humor, charm, and offbeat combat didn’t sit quite right with the rest of the genre’s classics on the SNES, but it stood the test of time to become one of the console’s definitive cult classics and a hugely influential title on an entire generation of game developers.

• Release Date — July 14, 1992
• Developer — Nintendo R&D 1, Intelligent Systems
• Publisher — Nintendo
• Genre — Simulation, Creative
• Review Aggregate Score — 76% (Generally Favorable)

As a game, Mario Paint left players with a bit to be desired at the time of its release. As a creative tool, though, Mario Party was practically revolutionary, allowing SNES owners to tinker around with an impressive suite of tools for painting, coloring, music composition, and film editing, all within the confines of a 16MB cartridge. All it takes is a quick YouTube search to see the impressive amount of content that players have made and are still making in Mario Paint‘s tools to see how ahead of its time it was, and that’s without even mentioning that it was the first Nintendo product to introduce a computer mouse to the home console market, decades before the Switch 2.

• Release Date — May 1, 1993
• Developer — Beam Software
• Publisher — Data East
• Genre — RPG
• Review Aggregate Score — 70% (Mixed or Average)

Popular tabletop RPG Shadowrun would begin development on its video game adaptation in 1989, only for it to spiral out of control, eventually releasing in 1993. Even with the benefit of more advanced hardware and gameplay mechanics, though, Shadowrun mostly went over players’ heads…except for those who actually gave it a shot. In terms of SNES action RPGs with tactical elements, Shadowrun is in a league of its own, and it’s also easy to see how influential the game would end up being on later classics like Deus Ex and other immersive sim progenitors. Shadowrun would eventually make a comeback with the excellent Returns trilogy of titles, but even those games owe a huge debt of gratitude to the SNES original.

• Release Date — August 9, 1996
• Developer — Amccus
• Publisher — Natsume
• Genre — JRPG, Simulation
• Review Aggregate Score — 73% (Mixed or Average)

At the time of its release, Harvest Moon was one of the final games on a dying platform, launching in the fall of 1996 well after both the Nintendo 64 and Sony PlayStation had arrived to usher in the 5th console generation. But that didn’t stop the title from earning a dedicated cult following, with those same players discovering the addictive nature of blending a traditional turn-based RPG with a farming sim. Were it not for Harvest Moon, modern mega-hits like Stardew Valley wouldn’t exist, and its place as the first title to popularize and establish the “FarmPG” genre positions it as one of the SNES’ most forward-thinking titles.

• Release Date — March 11, 1995
• Developer — Square
• Publisher — Square
• Genre — JRPG
• Review Aggregate Score — 96% (Universal Acclaim)

Speaking of “forward-thinking” games, Chrono Trigger is both a game about time travel and one that participates in a little bit of it, preemptively predicting the Square and Enix merger years before it actually happened by bringing both companies together to work on one of the SNES’ best games. Chrono Trigger was developed by a “Dream Team” between Square and Enix, bringing Square luminaries like Final Fantasy creator Hironobu Sakaguchi and composer Nobuo Uematsu side-by-side with Dragon Quest creator Yuji Horii and artist Akira Toriyama. Square and Enix would officially merge in 2003 as an RPG mega-conglomerate, and Chrono Trigger is the title that showed them how beneficial such a merger would be. Plus, it just so happens to be one of the greatest games ever made.

• Release Date — December 16, 1990
• Developer — Quintet
• Publisher — Enix
• Genre — Action RPG, City-Builder
• Review Aggregate Score — 79% (Generally Favorable)

Releasing in just the first few months of the SNES’ launch, Actraiser was a game like no other, and it somehow still is. Quintet’s unique blend of side-scrolling hack and slash action platformer with a city-building simulation RPG is a wholly original combination that struck a chord with many players who picked it up, even if it didn’t set the sales charts on fire. Quintet would end up releasing a series of incredible games on the SNES, each of them deserving a place on a list of the console’s most “ahead of their time” titles, but Actraiser is one of the few whose genre combination is so unique that it has yet to be accurately or faithfully reinterpreted by a modern title (except for the remake, Actraiser Renaissance).

• Release Date — November 18, 1994
• Developer — Rare
• Publisher — Nintendo
• Genre — Platformer
• Review Aggregate Score — 92% (Universal Acclaim)

A handful of games on this list are what could be considered a “master class” in game design for their respective genres, and such is the case for Rare’s Donkey Kong Country. One of the only platformers that could possibly de-throne Super Mario World for SNES supremacy, Donkey Kong Country is a near perfectly balanced game with stunning visuals, art direction, and sound design, unforgettable levels and boss fights, technical performance that blew players away both then and now, and a suitable challenge that sees it consistently rank as one of the most “tough-but-fair” games of the era. Donkey Kong Country and Super Mario World both helped rewrite the book on what a platformer should be, but Donkey Kong Country‘s visuals made it seem like it belonged on a brand-new console.

• Release Date — February 21, 1993
• Developer — Nintendo EAD, Argonaut Software
• Publisher — Nintendo
• Genre — Flight Simulation, Shooter
• Review Aggregate Score — 88% (Generally Favorable)

Going back today and playing Star Fox reveals a few uncomfortable truths about the game. It’s slow, it’s clunky, it hurts to look at, and it mostly pales in comparison to its Nintendo 64 follow-up. But for its time, Star Fox was nothing short of revolutionary. PC gaming was just beginning to come into its own in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and that a game like Star Fox could not just run on the Super Nintendo, but look better than many of its PC counterparts, was mystifying. Years before the entire industry shifted from 2D to 3D, Nintendo and Argonaut Software pulled out all the stops to deliver a game that felt like it was pulled straight out of the future with Star Fox.

• Release Date — November 21, 1990
• Developer — Nintendo EAD
• Publisher — Nintendo
• Genre — Platformer
• Review Aggregate Score — 94% (Universal Acclaim)

The Japanese launch of the Super Famicom in November of 1990 predated its North American counterpart, the SNES, by nearly a full year. And while Japanese players had had Super Mario Bros. 3 since 1988, American NES owners had only just been experiencing the game since 1990. That Super Mario World would have the same universal impact of blowing cross-cultural audiences away, regardless of how fresh Super Mario Bros. 3 was in their memory, speaks volumes about its brilliance and importance to both the SNES library and the platforming genre as a whole. It’s about as close to a “perfect” game as there is in the Super Nintendo’s library, and that it still stands as the best side-scrolling game in the Mario series is a testament to its timelessness.

• Release Date — March 19, 1994
• Developer — Nintendo R&D 1, Intelligent Systems
• Publisher — Nintendo
• Genre — Action Platformer, Metroidvania
• Review Aggregate Score — 97% (Universal Acclaim)

When a game’s name is one half of a portmanteau for an entire subgenre, you know it’s a title that’s ahead of its time. Metroid games had been influential and forward-thinking since the beginning, but the number of innovations brought to the table in Super Metroid, combined with how prevalent they are in just about every modern game falling under the Metroidvania umbrella, shows it to be one of the most pivotal and important releases in the SNES library. It doesn’t hurt that Super Metroid is a perfectly-paced, well-balanced experience that’s both intuitive and immersive, just as fun to speed-run as it is to spend hours upon hours getting lost in its atmospheric world. Every Metroidvania of the last 30 years has at least a little bit of Super Metroid in its DNA.