super nes classic

The Super NES Essays: The Donkey Kong Country Tape

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The Super Nintendo Essays is a series of posts detailing my history with and passion for the SNES. It had a profound effect on my life as a gamer, and I wanted to share some of my most memorable stories about it with you!

In the summer of 1994, I received an unusual package from Nintendo. Just a few months before, they had sent me a copy of Super Mario All-Stars as part of a promo for buying an SNES. This wasn’t a game, though. Inside, was a VHS tape about the upcoming Donkey Kong Country. Though I didn’t know about it before watching the video, I knew that game like the back of my hand long before it was inevitably released later that year.

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The Super Nintendo Essays: Brothers

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The Super Nintendo Essays is a series of posts detailing my history with and passion for the SNES. It had a profound effect on my life as a gamer, and I wanted to share some of my most memorable stories about it with you!

My brother and I are about seven years apart in age. That gap has led to us being in very different stages of our lives up until we both hit adulthood. While this at times made it difficult to connect, video games were always our common ground. That truly began with the Super Nintendo.

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The Super Nintendo Essays: The Original Console War

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The Super Nintendo Essays is a series of posts detailing my history with and passion for the SNES. It had a profound effect on my life as a gamer, and I wanted to share some of my most memorable stories about it with you!

In a world with no internet message boards or YouTube comments to defend your side, the battle between the Super Nintendo and the Sega Genesis was – and may forever be – the fiercest console war of them all. Unlike modern times where the differences between consoles are minimal at best, these were two wildly different platforms in virtually every way, from console architecture, to controller design, to marketing. Heck, even third party games sharing the same name were oftentimes completely different builds between the two.

I was there for pretty much all of it. And in hindsight, console wars were always dumb.

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The Super Nintendo Essays: Happy Birthday

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The Super Nintendo Essays is a series of posts detailing my history with and passion for the SNES. It had a profound effect on my life as a gamer, and I wanted to share some of my most memorable stories about it with you!

I remember the day when my Super NES hype hit a crescendo. For months, I pestered my parents about my desire to receive an SNES for my birthday. In response, they would usually troll me by saying they were going to get me a TurboGrafx-16 instead. As time went on, the jokes got a bit more intense, and one day, they broke me.

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Super NES Classic Pre-Orders Rolling Out Across North America and it’s Been a Mess

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Remember when Nintendo said that they would be making significantly more Super NES Classic Edition consoles than its NES counterpart? Sure didn’t look like it during this first round of North American pre-orders. Starting as early as 1am EST with Best Buy in the United States, pre-orders began rolling out and selling out just as fast as they arrived. Heck, during my attempt to snag one, it sold out in two minutes. You do not have to search that far on the internet to find many bitter customers who came up short when trying to snag Nintendo’s latest retro console.

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