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The year is 1990. Nintendo's one-time dominance of the global home console market has evaporated as rivals like Hudson and Sega hustle to seize precious chunks of market share for themselves. Making the best 8-bit games is no longer a guarantee of success, as a new 16-bit generation of processors is dawning, and with it the possibility of gaming's holy grail: games once only available in arcades being ported directly to your living room in all their big-sprited, non-bleepy-music'd glory. If Nintendo intended to stay top dog in the years to come, it was going to have to ride the 16-bit wave with its own new console, the Super Famicom, and make sure that its arcade ports were just as shiny and high-tech as the competition's. Instead they did what Nintendo always did in a pinch: hit a couple of foul balls and then bunt as if their life depended on it. In a world where every other console chased after access to hit computer and arcade games, Nintendo turned inward, focusing on their own first-party titles and counting on their status as industry leaders to bring the developers in. And they weren't going to make the most technically impressive games possible. To them, that was a fool's errand and a distraction from the most important thing: how fun the games were to play. While they didn't announce this strategy publicly in any traditional sense, in a way the most hotly anticipated launch title for the Super Famicom was a public announcement of their intentions. It was a silly, cartoonish game that never tested the limits of a player's twitch reflexes and mostly seemed interested in charming people rather than bowling them over with challenge. It was the fourth iteration of a game that had cemented Nintendo's legacy in the video game industry. It was Super Mario World, and it just might have been the best game ever made. Thanks for watching, everybody! Timestamps: 0:00 Introduction 5:16 Getting Outlandish In Dinosaur Land 14:29 Premise and Presentation 25:54 Mechanics and Enemies 41:18 The Legacy of Super Mario World