Superlatives are interesting things. Even though most reduce down to simply “better” or “best”, countless hundreds have become mainstays of the English lexicon. Just pick up any thesaurus and take a look. Seriously, try it. Oh, and when you’re done, look up the word “lexicon”. You know what it means? Thesaurus. I know, right? It’s all so meta. So meta in fact, it’s beyond meta. Fun fact: Meta comes from a Greek root meaning “beyond”. What does all this have to do with the Super Nintendo you ask? You’ve got some nerve mister.

One day, way back in the summer of 1986, my friend Franklin called me and said he had just got something called a “Nine Ten Doetainment Sister” for his birthday and that he wanted me to come over and “play it”. I had no idea what he was talking about. I assumed Franklin was high (again) and was seeing ‘skin spiders’ (again). But you know Franklin, what a nut. Anyway, I didn’t really have any friends and I was intrigued at this whole ‘Doetainment Sisters’ idea. So over I went. Once there, I discovered two things: 1) Franklins’ parents had actually got him a “Nintendo Entertainment System” for his birthday and, 2) Franklin wasn’t high at all. He was drunk. Very, very drunk. Seriously kids, stay in school.

That summer Franklin and I played his NES (a term I just invented just now) until school started. I remember it well. There were so many games. My favorite? It was a tie. Between all of them. I found it to be an amazing toy game system. It was better than an Odyssey, taped to the back of a ColecoVision, stapled to an Atari 2600. But as often happens, time passed and Franklin and his NES (mostly the latter) grew apart. Little did I know at the time, but the best was yet to come.

Flash forward to 1991. Now I was eighteen and out on my own. I had my own apartment, my own car, and climbing the corporate ladder at OfficeMax (and by ‘corporate ladder’ I mean actual ladders…usually carrying boxes of 3-ring binders or Sharpies). I was all grown up and eager to assert my newly found adulthood. So I did what any mature, responsible adult would do: I headed down to Toys “R” Us and bought my very own Nintendo.

"Super-King of Prefixes"

I was surprised to find the Nintendo Entertainment System had been recently usurped as the Fresh Prince of game systems. It was now all about the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (see, I told you that first paragraph would be relevant eventually). I decided to call mine the ‘SNES’ (a term I invented, by the way). All the kids were saying it was more dope, more fresh, and at least 50% more other 90’s slang words than its predecessor. So I spent my Officemax money and bought one. It came with a similarly superlative-ized game called ‘Super Mario World’. In fact, as I browsed through the other available games, I found quite a few called ‘Super (something)’. Apparently everyone had elected ‘super’ as the new king of prefixes. It had become a veritable ‘Super Prefix’ (side note: I played Super King of Prefixes and it sucked). Being the counter-culture, iconoclast, hipster I was, I deliberately looked for a game without any nominal superness. I came across one called “Populous” and it looked interesting. It was a game where you basically played a god. I found that it was more fun than Super Mario World and way more fun than climbing ladders at work. Not to get into too many details, but suffice to say an inordinate amount of ‘sick’ was ‘called in’ during those first few weeks.

During those days of marathon Populous-playing sessions, my friends (of which I had none) would watch me play and say things like ‘Can we play Mario or something?’ and ‘Why are all your friends imaginary?’ (they would also tell me to burn things occasionally). FOOLS! They knew not of what they spoke. This was no mere ‘Nintendo’. This was the ‘Super Nintendo’. The Nintendo to end all Nintendo’s. The controller alone blew my mind. This one had eight buttons. Eight. And two of those buttons? That’s right — shoulder buttons (later, I discovered they existed but for one reason: to make high-speed turns in F-Zero…but that’s a story for another day). And the SNES provided such sublime gameplay. Case in point: at the end of every level, the Populous guy (who kinda looked like Skeletor) would say ‘Well done, mortal.’. It would actually say it…out loud. It was surely the best game system that would ever exist, ever.

"Well done, He-Man... er Mortal."

But as Yoda said, “Always in motion is the future.” It’s been twenty years and the world is much different now. Phrases like “I have a VCR” have now been replaced with “I have a Blu-ray player and it can’t record anything”. Shows like “In Living Color” or “The Arsenio Hall Show” have been replaced with lots of shows without black people in them. What I called the “Walkman” is now called, well it’s still called the Walkman. But it’s a lot different now. Listen, the point is, it’s been twenty years since those heady days of 1991. Sure, some things are better. I mean in 1991 the US was only engaged in one war and now we have three at once. You can use peanut butter to kill quite a few elementary school kids. And let’s not forget about Fox News. But the greatest tragedy of all these advancements is how Nintendo no longer uses superlatives when naming their systems. It’s really quite an atrocity.

The latest iteration of the veritable Nintendo Entertainment System, the ‘Wii’, is very popular among today’s young people. One would think that naming a game system after a urine euphemism would be a bad idea. But it seems anything goes with kids today. I’m not surprised. Just look at them. With their rap singing and Macpods. Honestly. And for the love of god, will you please pull up your freaking pants?! Don’t even get me started on what passes for Voltron these days. Plastic, Mattel? Plastic?!

"We're supposed to fly in what?"

But I digress.

There are so many systems today. I don’t know, I guess they are all pretty cool. And I admit I left my SNES behind long ago (I think I sold it for rent money). But despite all the advancements in gaming technology, it’s still the Super Nintendo that holds the fairy bottle to my heart containers.

And that, true believer, is the greatest superlative of them all.

Check out more from Mike over on his blog.

Tags: f-zero, NES, Populous, SNES, SNES 20th Anniversary, Super Mario World, Voltron, Wii

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