SNES Classic announced

[Shifty Geezer]

I just had a google apparently NES and SNES both ran at the same resolution 256x240. SNES had more colors and prolly better processors,memory etc but if you at the graphics it wasnt a major improvement

Did you not notice these consoles at the time? SNES is vastly superior and it's no surprise responses to this post assume your joking or are trying an uber-troll! Don't look at comparison pics if there aren't any. Look at games that got ports. eg. Street Fighter

Or try Donkey Kong

You could also Google specs rather than looking at a single comparison image to see SNES went up to 4x the resolution,

 

[Rodéric]

That could be a good way to teach video games to my wife and son, maybe also my nephews...
There's a lack of beginners titles these days.

 

[Rangers]

I've already beaten several and am not interested in several more, so 21 games starts to look thin pretty fast. I wish they would include 100 games or something, at least 40. But Nintendo gonna Nintendo I guess.

That said of course I want it. Nice to hear the controller cords are a slightly less awful 5 feet this time (vs 3 feet on Nes Mini) and you get 2, albeit the price is up $20.

Scalpers are just going to have a fricken field day with this, making it a nightmare for all of us, pretty much no matter HOW many Nintendo produces at this point. UGH.

I was always way more excited for this than the NES mini. While in my memory nothing will ever top the fun I had with the NES, and SNES wasn't close to that, 16-bit era graphics have aged drastically better. 16 bit was the inflection point where 2d graphics became pretty and timeless.

I just hope Nintendo makes enough of these. NES classic had shortages and still sold 2.3 million..so I am really hoping they are planning to make at least 5 million of these.

5 million wont even dent it. At what point do they hit saturation worldwide? Am I crazy for thinking it'd be something like 100 million?

Hopefully they treat this as an actual profit maker rather than whatever crap they were doing with the NES mini, and thus actually produce some. The $20 higher tag is a start.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

5 million wont even dent it. At what point do they hit saturation worldwide? Am I crazy for thinking it'd be something like 100 million?

I think so. SNES sold 50 million, less than NES. 10 million would be a great number.

 

[Rangers]

I suppose over a short time, but considering this could sell to all USA/Europe/Japan, it's relatively cheap, and nostalgia factor, I would think 100m over time would be achievable, if they wanted.

Population was lower and video games less of a mainstream thing back in SNES era, not directly comparable IMO. I get that it puts a cap in theory on how many would have true nostalgia value, but there's probably 14 year old girls today who would claim to be nostalgic for Mario, maybe they played it on a smartphone.

Realistically I would think they need to get out 10 million to have any chance to satiate the holiday market in 2017. Would that really have any chance? There's 323 million people in USA alone and probably almost all of them want one (j/k, sort of). Ignoring 400+ million in Europe. 20 million might be a better start. But I've never heard of 20 million of any console being produced in a quarter, OTOH this is exceedingly low tech.

Kinda hard to judge really. The scalping mania kind of feeds on itself and makes it hard to judge true demand (people probably want one partly because they know it's hot and cant get one, in case of NES mini).

 

[Reznor007]

But were any of those better looking games first party Nintendo titles?

Compare nes metroid to super metroid, massive improvements.

Nes Mario games to super Mario world, or even better with Mario world 2 yoshis island with its huge scaling/rotating sprites.

Super Mario kart, f zero, and pilotwings had nothing comparable on nes that I can think of.

 

[shredenvain]

Did you not notice these consoles at the time? SNES is vastly superior and it's no surprise responses to this post assume your joking or are trying an uber-troll! Don't look at comparison pics if there aren't any. Look at games that got ports. eg. Street Fighter

View attachment 2062

Or try Donkey Kong

You could also Google specs rather than looking at a single comparison image to see SNES went up to 4x the resolution,

I agree completely. I sold my NES and gave the $ to my parents and they got me a SNES at north american launch.

It came with Super Mario World as the pack in. The moment I popped in the cartridge I noticed a huge upgrade (even at age 11) in sprite quality along with color and sound. Not only was the SNES a big jump in power over the Nes, it was a substantial jump in graphics/sound over the Genesis/Megadrive.

I mean titles like MK2, SF2, Super Metroid and F zero were beautiful considering the home console landscape of the 16-bit era.
Then the later half of the cycle brought games like Starfox, Dk Country and Stunt racefx that were revolutionary graphically for home consoles. Resolution isn't the end all be all now and it damn sure wasn't then.

 

[Blazkowicz]

5 million wont even dent it. At what point do they hit saturation worldwide? Am I crazy for thinking it'd be something like 100 million?

Hopefully they treat this as an actual profit maker rather than whatever crap they were doing with the NES mini, and thus actually produce some. The $20 higher tag is a start.

They should do what others do in the mobile phone space and second source the parts - wholly different SoC and perhaps motherboard. Assuming this doesn't create a stupid feud about who has the better one.

 

[mpg1]

5 million wont even dent it. At what point do they hit saturation worldwide? Am I crazy for thinking it'd be something like 100 million?

Hopefully they treat this as an actual profit maker rather than whatever crap they were doing with the NES mini, and thus actually produce some. The $20 higher tag is a start.

100 million? yeah that's a crazy number. The original SNES only sold half that...

I'd say at best high single digit millions...

I went with 5 million because that is roughly double of what they of sold NES Classic (2.3 million)... and while I think the demand will be high for this I think there are gonna be some people who bought the NES Classic last year that will have second thoughts about shelling out $80 for nostalgia again. There was a neogaf thread yesterday asking what people have done with there NES classic since they bought it and like 90% of the responses were "still in box" or "opened, played for about an hour, never used it since".

 

[AlNom]

Would love to just have the classic mini chassis by itself just to put on the shelf.

 

[Michellstar]

Would love to just have the classic mini chassis by itself just to put on the shelf.

You can have one 3d printed, an put a raspberry on it

 

[Rangers]

100 million? yeah that's a crazy number. The original SNES only sold half that...

I'd say at best high single digit millions...

I went with 5 million because that is roughly double of what they of sold NES Classic (2.3 million)... and while I think the demand will be high for this I think there are gonna be some people who bought the NES Classic last year that will have second thoughts about shelling out $80 for nostalgia again. There was a neogaf thread yesterday asking what people have done with there NES classic since they bought it and like 90% of the responses were "still in box" or "opened, played for about an hour, never used it since".

I had a strong feeling that's what I'd have done with my NES classic, had I got one.

But a decent part of that is, it's NES. Those games are painfully ugly. I'll be much more likely to at least dabble in some SNES games.


2.3 million didn't even come anywhere close to satiating demand for NES classic. I halfheartedly tried to get one for scalping for months, literally as soon as any site got stock it was instantly gone (from bots probably). Also usually the site that got it would crash from the traffic, no matter if it was even WalMart.com. Would double that, 5 million, do it? I dont think anywhere close. Not remotely close. MAYBE we could start to talk about 10 million delivered in a couple months, but I still strongly doubt it.

Just regular people were passing around news of the NES classic release on facebook at the time it was announced. I believe my sister was the first one who informed me! It was about as mainstream as it gets. Regular people, not gamers, wanted it.

The increase to 80, yeah that's a thing. Still basically disposable money that wont make anybody blink though I think.

 

[mpg1]

I had a strong feeling that's what I'd have done with my NES classic, had I got one.

But a decent part of that is, it's NES. Those games are painfully ugly. I'll be much more likely to at least dabble in some SNES games.


2.3 million didn't even come anywhere close to satiating demand for NES classic. I halfheartedly tried to get one for scalping for months, literally as soon as any site got stock it was instantly gone (from bots probably). Also usually the site that got it would crash from the traffic, no matter if it was even WalMart.com. Would double that, 5 million, do it? I dont think anywhere close. Not remotely close. MAYBE we could start to talk about 10 million delivered in a couple months, but I still strongly doubt it.

Just regular people were passing around news of the NES classic release on facebook at the time it was announced. I believe my sister was the first one who informed me! It was about as mainstream as it gets. Regular people, not gamers, wanted it.

The increase to 80, yeah that's a thing. Still basically disposable money that wont make anybody blink though I think.

They are only selling it for 3 months...either way, you think the actual demand of people wanting to buy was at least 4X what they sold of NES classic? I think you are overestimating a little. I expect them to sell 7 million at absolute most. Half of the craze over NES Classic was not being able to get it.

 

[Rangers]

Oh at LEAST 4x...

There's already a huge GAF thread of basically people camping preorder sites, waiting to pounce. They will sell out probably in seconds not minutes.

If they make 7m they will sell that. At what point they wont sell every one they make I dont know, but it's more than 7 million.

 

[mpg1]

Oh at LEAST 4x...

There's already a huge GAF thread of basically people camping preorder sites, waiting to pounce. They will sell out probably in seconds not minutes.

If they make 7m they will sell that. At what point they wont sell every one they make I dont know, but it's more than 7 million.

GAF isn't millions of people...it's an enthusiast site. Not a great gauge.

I'm sticking with my 5-7 million prediction. Don't think the demand is there for more...also don't think Nintendo will be be able to produce many more than that for a 3 month availability window.

 

[Rangers]

Not a "prediction" but if they only produce 5-7 million in a 3 month window it will be sold out at all times.

BTW are we sure it's only 3 months? Didn't NES classic continue to drip out into spring?

 

[mpg1]

Not a "prediction" but if they only produce 5-7 million in a 3 month window it will be sold out at all times.

BTW are we sure it's only 3 months? Didn't NES classic continue to drip out into spring?

Nintendo has said it will be available until the end of 2017. Think NES classic was available into 2017 because it was a delay reaction to the success which they weren't expecting...so they produced more. But ultimately I think these are meant to be limited time holiday only products.

 

[Cyan]

I agree completely. I sold my NES and gave the $ to my parents and they got me a SNES at north american launch.

It came with Super Mario World as the pack in. The moment I popped in the cartridge I noticed a huge upgrade (even at age 11) in sprite quality along with color and sound. Not only was the SNES a big jump in power over the Nes, it was a substantial jump in graphics/sound over the Genesis/Megadrive.

I mean titles like MK2, SF2, Super Metroid and F zero were beautiful considering the home console landscape of the 16-bit era.
Then the later half of the cycle brought games like Starfox, Dk Country and Stunt racefx that were revolutionary graphically for home consoles. Resolution isn't the end all be all now and it damn sure wasn't then.

F-Zero was impressive, and always will. Super Castlevania IV...was impressive. I think it is missing some games: UN Squadron comes to mind, among others.

 

[zed]

Did you not notice these consoles at the time?

no Im a computer guy, spectrum,c64,amiga,pc the only consoles I've played is atari 2600 and ps3 (played a buzz quiz game on it when you had a controller with colored buttons

, so still never touched a proper playstation or xbox controller), I've never seen a nes or snes IRL (except perhaps in a film) so I googled graphics comparison between the two and apart from better colors it wasnt a huge leap, certainly not the leap that PC games made at the time. Wikipedia doesnt have much info about the snes hardware though I see elsewhere it can do better than 256x224 in a few games (why so few? restricted to monochrome perhaps with that graphics mode?)

though from some more googling
first title that gets mentioned here by tongue_of_colicab, Yoshi's island
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Super_NES_enhancement_chips 'Super FX chip in Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island'
hypothesis, perhaps the reason so few games use higher resolutions etc is it requires extra hardware, this could be wrong though.
Like I said contrast this with the massive improvement of computer graphics over the same time, the stuff I was playing on my amiga 500 looked much better (which came out 3 friggen years before the SNES )

 

[milk]

The way graphics wee done on nes, snes and many of the arcade boards was very diferent. 60fps was pretty much a given in most console games, since it would be a waste not to update at that rate when the graphics chip would unavoidably re-draw the whole screen every frame. Few computer games with rich graphics could updated at 60fps at the time. The vertical resolution was also tied to the standardized physical resolution of TVs of the time, another shackle computers did not have.
Still, these consoles had very specific capabilities. The NES could draw one scrolling layer of tiled 3-colored graphic patterns with one distinct pallete out of 4 for each 16x16 pixel block, and a few dozen 3 coloured 8x8 sprites on top of that. On snes you could have 3 scrolling layers, with 15 diferent colors per 16x16 pixel block. These layers could also use transparency effects (this doesn't show well on static screenshots as its when the screen moves and the different bg layers move in parallax that it really shows)
On 8bit nes If you had more than 8 sprites on a single horizontal line, some of the objects on that line would disapear. For reference, mario took 2 sprites horizontally, a turtle, another three. You could have mo more than 2 turtles and mario line up on screen before artifacts apeared. On SNES you could have up to 32 sprites on the same scan-line. That's 4x the amount of moving objects on screen. Those could also have 15 colors each instead of 3, and 8 distinct 15 color palletes were usable by the sprites instead of NES's 4.