Recreating the Sonic Aesthetics of the Super Nintendo

The world of early video games is a world of electronic instruments and synthesis; oscillators and duty cycles. As the 1990s and the Super Nintendo come to prominence, we leave this soundscape behind for one of sampled audio—we start to hear the playback of instruments. Due to limitations of technology, this remains a separate, discrete soundscape from the world of high-fidelity recorded audio, and a soundscape that many developers seek to emulate, especially in an ongoing age of remasters, remakes, and releases where channeling a specific aesthetic is part of the design goals of video games created in recent times. This article explores how composers and communities recreate and repurpose the aesthetic of consoles utilizing compressed, sampled audio from roughly 1991 to 2001, with strong emphasis on the Super Nintendo hardware.