The Super Nintendo Was Never Wrong

The Super Nintendo is the best games console ever made. I hold this not as a debatable opinion but as a fact that some people haven’t caught up to yet. No machine before or since produced that specific density of defining work in one place—The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, Chrono Trigger, Secret of Mana, Terranigma, Parodius. The platform defines the medium the way certain albums define a decade. You don’t argue with it.

Platform games in particular achieved something on that hardware that felt genuinely new and has never quite been replicated—Super Mario World, Donkey Kong Country, Yoshi’s Island, Ghouls ’n Ghosts. And across the wider ecosystem: Alex Kidd in Miracle World on the Master System, Sonic the Hedgehog on the Mega Drive, Mega Man on the NES. A whole era of games that understood something about difficulty, momentum, and reward that a lot of modern design has quietly walked away from.

Gregor Kartsios and Fabian Käufer, hosts of Plauschangriff—a gaming podcast from the Rocket Beans TV network, which started as a fan project and grew into an actual media company—spent three hours going deep on retro platformers. Commodore 64 through PlayStation, the full arc. It’s the kind of conversation that assumes you care about this history seriously, not ironically, and doesn’t feel the need to justify that.

Three hours is a long time to talk about platform games. I listened to most of it while doing other things and kept stopping to actually pay attention. That’s a better endorsement than anything else I could write.