10 Impossible Video Games That Shouldn't Exist
4. StarFox - Super Nintendo
In 1993, Nintendo released Star Fox causing the jaws of consumers to drop wide open. It might seem incredibly quaint now but considering that home consoles had never seen anything in the third dimension before it was a revelation. After all, the Super Nintendo hadn’t been built for 3D and the technology was, of course, a whole other generation away.
Star Fox was the brainchild of a partnership between Nintendo and Argonaut Software, who had previously made the Starglider games for Amiga. Nintendo saw the potential and wanted their own spin on this but, after internally porting their Starglider prototype to the SNES, Argonaut admitted that “this is the best we can do without dedicated hardware”.
Nintendo wouldn’t take no for an answer however and instead dreamt up the SuperFX chip that would come installed into the cartridge of some SNES games. Cleverly utilising unused pins on the cartridge, it would push the console’s capabilities beyond Nintendo's original design specs. This first-ever 3D processor in a consumer product allowed the SNES, a system that typically ran 2D titles, to render 3D polygons.
With it, Star Fox was born. Very few other games used the SuperFX chip but Nintendo was willing to go the extra mile to realise Miyamoto and Argonaut Software’s vision.