Dumping the childhood video game collection, pt. 4

Goodbye SNES

This one has many memories attached to it. For me, the SNES era marked the moment in time where video games became a part of my self-identity. Video games were my favorite thing in the world. There’s evidence of this in this book project we did in kindergarten:

Dumb kid was me. Favorite game at the rec. center was Captain Commando (1991). The Super Nintendo in the drawing is the same one in the first photograph of the post.

I’ll definitely be sad to be dumping my SNES and all the Super Famicom games I played on it, but I’d much rather have the freed up space. Accessibility isn’t a huge concern for me because many of these games have been re-released for newer consoles, SNES consoles and games are very easy to grab on eBay if I ever change my mind, and this was recently announced.

Favorite childhood memories or stories:

  • I pulled my first all-nighter, ever, on the Christmas of 1992 or 1993 when I received the SNES and Super Mario World as a Christmas gift. I also stopped believing in Santa because I found the receipt for the SNES in the trash can.
  • I went bonkers the first time I saw Primal Rage (1994) in arcades. After all, it was practically Mortal Kombat + claymation dinosaurs. No doubt, this game tried to piggy back off the hype of the Jurassic Park films. With that franchise having new films added to it as of 2015, I feel this game is ripe for a current-gen reboot.
  • I was a huge fan of Mortal Kombat II (1994)‘s fatalities. I purchased gaming magazines to learn the move lists and would keep hand-written notes of hidden move and fatality button combos. I purchased a Mortal Kombat game later as an adult for PS3 and it was interesting to see that the appeal didn’t age well. Having button combos easily accessible oh my smartphone took away the magic and made fatalities feel more like a chore.
  • Instead of a save mechanic, Mega Man 7 (1995) had a password system. You’d be shown a certain combination of icons on a grid at certain points of the game so that you could re-enter that combination to continue progress from that point. I kept precious hand-written notes of these password grids. For some reason, this made the game more fun for me, though I’d bet money that the Mega Man password grid system was just a cheap hack around not being able to save games in the earlier Mega Man games.

Favorite 5 games from this console:

  1. Super Mario World
  2. Super Mario RPG
  3. Mega Man 7
  4. Killer Instinct
  5. Metal Combat (seriously underrated! Light gun + mechs.)