SNES

The Super Nintendo Entertainment System was released in Europe in 1993 and immediatly it raised the bar for video game designers around the globe.

Nintendo did not stopped the development on releasing the original NES, but reached out for new innovations.

An interesting feature of many SNES games is, that they used special enhancemet chips to enable more powerful games to be played such as Super Mario Kart by providing more realistic 3D graphics effects (3D-Courses). It was also the first time for polygon effects and the bending and stretching of shapes.

Compared to NES here are some new innovations:
Super Nintendo is featuring true stereo-sound, multiple scrolling backgrounds and twice the internal memory.
Also the memories on the game modules were significantly increased to create extraordinary worlds with love for detail.
The super gameboy-adapter (a SNES game module to plug into the gameboy-module) allows the gamers to enjoy their gameboy-games on tv.
About the controllers, it has one controlpad with left/right/up/down functions, shift buttons on the side of the controller and 6 buttons, that allow players to have many options easily accessible, including the 2 menu buttons (Start, Select).

With only 2 controller ports the SNES required a multitap to allow up to 6 players at once.