Parents Didn't Just Dislike Super Nintendo 25 Years Ago--They Thought It Was a Scam

The Super Nintendo Entertainment System is 25 years old. That means it's been 25 years since Americans first learned, sometimes painfully, that game consoles have an expiration date. It's not without good reason that the 16-bit followup to Nintendo's incredibly popular 8-bit Nintendo Entertainment System is considered one of the all-time great gaming consoles. Kicking off with the massive, superbly designed Super Mario World, the cutting-edge tech in the SNES produced colorful graphics, nifty technological tricks, and high-fidelity soundtracks that powered the most impressive games of the pixel era. Just two years later, SNES games would have the power to handle real 3-D graphics, foreshadowing the industry's incipient shift from sprites to polygons. When Nintendo launched the SNES, videogame products didn't have official release dates.