First released in 1990, the Super Famicom (Japan) aka Super Nintendo (US/Europe) Entertainment System featured “a low-performance CPU supported by powerful custom chips for sound and video processing — this approach would become common in subsequent video game hardware, but at the time it was new to game developers.” A second version, the SNES 2, was released in 1997, priced at $99. Video after the jump.
As a result early third-party games were of low technical quality. Developers later became accustomed to the system, and were able to take advantage of its full potential. It was the first console capable of applied acoustics in video game audio sold in North America, Europe, and Japan
