The Connections Project

Nintendo Entertainment System

The Super Nintendo was a giant technological leap forward from its mother system, the NES. The latter stored information in 16-bit chunks, and the SNES doubled this, providing developers 32-bit data and a processor to work with them. Super Nintendo came with the SPC sound system, blowing the regular Nintendo's chirpy sounds out of the water. SNES games had SRAM, the ability to save a significant amount of data without the unreliability of NES savefiles. The SNES controller had three times as many non-directional non-start-select buttons. Altogether it was a revolutionary leap forward.

The early Gameboy was pretty close in terms of raw features to its much larger parent system. The innovation was not in the actual games but in the fact that Gameboy was handheld and you could carry it in your backpack. The original Gameboy screen was monochrome, unlike the color NES which spawned it.

The Playstation, one might argue, was the first popular "TransNintendoist" console, in the sense that the PS is so much more powerful, that an NES-style game could be seamlessly embedded inside a PS game. PS games began to include "minigames" like the FF7 bike game, which, by their lone selves, even with graphics downgraded appropriately, would have represented very impressive games on the NES.

In a very real sense, the N64 was the last recognizable descendant of the NES in the Nintendo portfolio: the next creation would be the Wii, which was a radical departure from the whole formula.

After the SNES, N64, and the obscure GameCube, the Wii was the first Nintendo system which finally managed to break the basic formula which the NES established and which the other systems merely polished. The Wii's motion-based control system was a real innovation in the console war.