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Super Nintendo Classic Coming in September (hollywoodreporter.com)
Rumors are true. Nintendo is gearing up to launch the SNES Classic, a miniaturized version of the glorious original Super Nintendo Entertainment System. The console will include 21 games when it launches September 29. A report adds: Among the big surprises: a never-before released Star Fox 2 is in the mix. Here's the full list of games: Super Mario World, Super Mario Kart, The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, F-Zero, Super Metroid, Super Street Fighter II Turbo: Hyper Fighting, Super Punch Out, Super Castlevania IV, Donkey Kong Country, Mega Man X, Kirby Super Star, Final Fantasy III, Kirby's Dream Course, Star Fox, Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island, Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars, Contra III: The Alien Wars, Secret of Mana, EarthBound, and Super Ghouls 'n Ghosts. It will retail at a price point of $80.
They went to 11 for that games list!
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But i'm going to hold out for the N64 Classic.
...51 people will actually be able to get one, instead of the 50 that were able to get an NES Classic.
Not holding my breath.
Nice games list, but will they make enough to come close to demand?
Considering how things played out last time with the NES Classic, I'm not holding my breath that this will ever truly become "available" to the masses for the $79.99 price mentioned in the article (and not in the summary).
A few years ago I was thinking about building an arcade cabinet. Even found working copies of several thousand old ROMs including all the classics that I plugged an uncountable number of quarters into. I could invest a couple of hours into getting all of that working on the machine connected to my TV and still be ahead of the $200-$300 a NES Classic, plus whatever $$$ this new SNES Classic will end up costing. And still play all of the games included in both the NES and SNES Classic's.
Nintendo should be manufacturing additional NES Classic units instead of shutting their production down (Which has already occurred) and then announcing a Super Nintendo Classic. They haven't remotely met demand for the first retro console yet. Many of us were looking forward to it from the second it was announced, but there were no pre-orders available online, so we waited, and tried to buy it release day, and it sold out instantly. Several "click-a-thons" were announced by Amazon, Walmart.com, etc. that involved everyone getting online at, say, 5pm on a Tuesday and trying to buy a limited supply, which crashed their severs and left people hitting reload for a half hour in a row a half dozen or a dozen days of this, and not getting the product.
Some people who were trying to get it from the beginning STILL don't have the product like a year after it was announced and 8 months or so after it came out. Ebay prices are sky-high for a $60 retail console.
Nintendo should meet demand and make sure all the people who were ready to buy an NES Classic before or on release day get the opportunity to buy a new one at the retail price before moving on to the next thing.
I've pretty much vowed not to consider getting a Nintendo Switch, a Super Nintendo Classic, pay for the Mario smartphone game, or in any way contribute to funding anything Nintendo until they provide what they hyped up and then never made available to me in the most annoying way possible- a way that took a ton of time and was very frustrating. No NES Classic, no me buying Nintendo products going forward. I don't like the way they do business.
A 3d Printed Case and Raspberry PI are FAR cheaper, and MANY times more capable!
to keep the scalpers at bay. It's going to sell for 3x the asking price, meaning a scalper could buy 3, sit on 1 and sell two and make a nice profit. I could do a little more math and tell you how many they could sit on and still do well. Basically, these would have to be so common that the scalpers can't keep up.
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Talk about shut up and take my money. Maybe they'll remix the audio as well. Get some authentic 5.1 surround. Not holding my breath.
"UNIX is very simple, it just needs a genius to understand its simplicity." -Dennis Ritchie
Cheaper, and likely not legal to use in your jurisdiction.
If you're like me and already own almost all of these games on the original cartridges, then you can probably legally play them on a Raspberry Pi. But if you were to buy all of them on ebay, you'd spend quite a bit more than $80. (EarthBound and Super Mario RPG are both pricey), and Star Fox 2 isn't even available.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Is it appropriate to spend money recycling them into a new platform? I would think that rather than coming up with yet another console, wouldn't it be more effective for the customers and more profitable for Nintendo to make these games available on DVDs/cartridges for current systems?
That would leave more money & engineering talent for developing new and better hardware instead of recycling the same things over and over again?
I love playing Super Mario Kart and a number of the other games they're bringing back, but I don't want to pay for another console if it doesn't bring me any new capabilities for the future.
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How much would the ROM licenses for your Raspberry Pi solution run you? They wouldn't even be available for first-party games, which outnumber third-party games in this collection.
wouldn't it be more effective for the customers and more profitable for Nintendo to make these games available on DVDs/cartridges for current systems?
Wii and Wii U had Virtual Console, which is what you describe except provided as a download rather than as physical media. The best guess for when Virtual Console will reach Nintendo Switch is 2018, when Nintendo plans to launch the Switch's online service.
and its already sold out...
I only care whether it takes original controllers or not. If not, fail.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Hope they make the controller cords longer this time!
Raspberry Pi with NES, SNES, N64 (albeit hit or miss), Sega, etc.
Chewbacon
The Bible is like Wikipedia: written by a bunch of people and verifiable by questionable sources.
I am surprised by the lack of Chrono Trigger.
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No Chrono Trigger??
Also, why not complete series like Mega Man X, X2, X3 and Donkey Kong Country 1, 2 and 3? The other two Final Fantasy would have been great too.
Elok
You don't need to say "price point," you can just say "price." It means the same.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
For about 110$ TOTAL, you can get an Odroid Xu4, Fan cooled, with a 4 Amp Power Supply, a 32GB eMMC Drive, and 2 SNES style controllers... This + Retroarch on Meveric's GameStation Turbo Image = up to 25,000 Total games that can be played... For anyone who owns a large Cartridge collection, you can build a multicart rom dumper from off the shelf stuff these days. The code is all over the web in multiple forms. I have been building my own Multi-system machines with Hyperspin, RocketLauncher, Retroarch, and Others for Years. Back in the day this was hard, now ANYONE can look up how to do it. These retro systems are a joke as far as the offering. When off the shelf hobby electronics can beat the pants off your offering, its time to "up your game" so to speak :-P
Why have just Super Mario World when you can have Super Mario All-Stars + Super Mario World
What point are you trying to make? Old games had to fit on small media, this is not news.
But not enough to pay $180-$200US for it. And even if I happen to stumble upon one of these SNES in store, I'm not paying $80 mostly because I never played SNES. I played the shit out of the original NES. But after that my parents decided to go Sega and I decided to go PC gaming. I'm sure the nostalgia market for SNES will be huge, I'm just not among their potential buyers. Maaaaaybe if they combined the SNES with the NES classic so I could still get the NES stuff, but not as a separate thing.
Why have just Super Mario World when you can have Super Mario All-Stars + Super Mario World
The answer to this is obvious. They've decided how many games they want on it at this price. If they add too many, no one will buy them on Virtual Console. The number of cartridges is irrelevant. It doesn't matter if they have 21 or 22 "cartridges". They likely have the exact same hardware in this as the NES classic*, and that had room for literally hundreds of games, not just the 30 included. They don't want to reduce the perceived value of their games by making them too cheap. Indeed, if they wanted to include Super Mario All-Stars, they would have included it as a separate "cartridge", so the marketing could increase the game count. They actually did this for the NES Classic with Donkey Kong and Donkey Kong Jr. They could have combined them into the Donkey Kong Classics "cartridge" (also released for the NES as a combined cartridge), but why would they. They can include as many completely Nintendo owned games as they want at zero cost to them. The opportunity cost in other sales and perceived value, however, stops them from doing so.
*Which hopefully explains why they discontinued that one...every additional NES Classic they produced would've meant exactly one less SNES Classic produced. They are likely identical with a different plastic shell, as the NES Classic hardware is perfectly capable of playing SNES games. The controllers are likely using the exact same board as the NES classic controller (which is actually just a Wii Classic Controller board) as well. This was the reason they discontinued the NES Classic, they wanted to produce these instead. They might go back to the NES if the SNES sales were to ever slow, just needing to use the other plastic parts and box. The electronics would be identical and require no production changes.
The game lineup is amazing. Price will be a big deal.
Who hasn't heard/watched "Rawest Forest" (Super Mario RPG)?
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And I'm sure those third party companies would be more than happy to renegotiate a gravy train. Sure maybe the price has to go up, but at $70, I'm sure NIntendo could raise it to $100 to relicense the games. It's not like those games were making much money otherwise sitting around. I'm sure those companies were making a TON of money off their NES games at this point in time.
Hell, I'm sure more companies might come around and beg Nintendo to add their game in - free money and all off something they only have to provide a binary copy of and a scan (though considering Nintendo made all the cartridges, perhaps Nintendo has all the original binaries and manual coillateral).
The only games that won't are those whose rights are really up in the air, but I'm sure if Nintendo put out a call for rightsholders to include their game in the NES Classic II, they'd pop out of the woodwork for free money.