Photo credit: Ryoplanshop
Here’s a fascinating look back at the SuFami Turbo, a bizarre SNES accessory that lets you play multiple games at once. Unfortunately (or fortunately), it was only released in Japan during 1996 for the Super Famicom, priced at a very reasonable $46 USD ($92 in 2025), with games costing $27 ($54 in 2025).
This accessory features two cartridge slots, and the idea was that games could be produced at a much lower cost with a much shorter development time, since studios did not have to wait on Nintendo for cartridge production. Even more surprising is the fact that SuFami Turbo was officially approved by Nintendo under the provision that Bandai handle all the hardware manufacturing itself. Put simply, the cartridge loaded in slot 1 is the game that will be played, while the cartridge in the second slot supplies additional data for use in the main title. In the end, only thirteen games were released, with just nine of them being able to link up.
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Im not sure how this works exactly but it almost sounds like a ROM hack patcher – you have base game then the second cart has patch data that the Sufami patches onto base game with custom content (more specifically, patching into RAM the new places to find sprites and other code). Playing Super Mario World with characters from other games for example could be fun, though cross-company collabs would probably have been rare,” said one commenter.
