Curated playlist
Super Nintendo Entertainment System games
- Street Fighter Alpha 2Street Fighter Alpha 2 made its public debut at the February 1996 AOU show in Tokyo. It arrived less than a year after Street Fighter Alpha: Warriors' Dreams, its direct predecessor. Among the new characters was Sakura, a face that had…
- Street Fighter II TurboStreet Fighter II Turbo: Hyper Fighting reached arcades in 1992 not as a new machine but as an upgrade kit. Capcom built it for installation directly into Champion Edition circuit boards already in those arcades, less than a year after…
- Final Fantasy Mystic QuestFinal Fantasy Mystic Quest arrived in North America in 1992 with a label that few major game publishers would dare to put on a box: it was marketed as a "simplified role-playing game... designed for the entry-level player." Square, the…
- Final Fantasy VFinal Fantasy V launched in Japan in December 1992, and within a single day it sold roughly 900,000 cartridges. That opening figure was about 4.5 times the first-day numbers posted by Final Fantasy IV the year before. Japanese authorities…
- Super Star WarsSuper Star Wars arrived on the Super Nintendo Entertainment System in 1992, and it asked a simple question: what if you could fight your way through a galaxy far, far away? Not watch it. Fight through it. The developers at LucasArts and…
- Tokimeki Memorial (video game)Tokimeki Memorial arrived on the PC Engine on the 27th of May 1994, carrying a premise that made seasoned game journalists stop cold. Konami, the company behind Gradius and its reputation for punishing arcade-style challenges, had built a…
- Doom (1993 video game)Doom, released on the 10th of December 1993, crashed a university's network before most people had even heard of it. At midnight, after thirty straight hours of testing, the five-person team at id Software uploaded the first episode to an…
- Super Street Fighter IISuper Street Fighter II reached arcades in 1993 as the fourth version Capcom had released under the Street Fighter II name. Game Machine in Japan ranked it the most popular table arcade game of October 1993. This was the first Street…
- The Lost VikingsThe Lost Vikings arrived in 1993 as a puzzle-platform game from a studio that would later become one of the most recognizable names in gaming. Silicon & Synapse, as Blizzard Entertainment was then called, handed players not one hero but…
- Street Fighter IIStreet Fighter II arrived in arcades in 1991 and changed the way people played games in public spaces. By 1994, an estimated 25 million people in the United States alone had played it. That figure does not count Japan, Europe, or the rest…
- Final Fantasy IVFinal Fantasy IV arrived in Japan in 1991, and with it came Cecil Harvey, a dark knight who steers warships through the sky for the Kingdom of Baron. The game opens not with a hero's triumph but with a crime: the Red Wings, Cecil's own…
- Final Fantasy VIFinal Fantasy VI arrived in Japanese homes on the 2nd of April, 1994, carrying a premise that broke from every rule the series had established. Where earlier installments placed players in medieval kingdoms, this game opened with…
- Final Fight (video game)Final Fight arrived in arcades in 1989 with a premise that could have come straight out of a Hollywood action film: a former pro wrestler turned city mayor tears through six rounds of urban chaos to rescue his kidnapped daughter. Capcom's…
- Space InvadersSpace Invaders arrived in Japanese arcades in July 1978, and within months the country was running out of places to put the machines. Pachinko parlors and bowling alleys were the first to adopt it when amusement arcade owners passed. Then…