Minecraft on the Super Nintendo, No Extra Chips Required

A playable version of Minecraft is currently available for the standard Super Nintendo. There is no Super FX chip or additional processors packed inside the cartridge. Only the system, as advertised by Nintendo in the early 1990s, drives a small blocky environment in which you can dig, place bricks, and even enter a tiny Nether.

Game of Tobi made the cut, as he’d already managed to squeeze a primitive 3D Minecraft onto the Game Boy Color a few months before. That version worked, but the tiny fella struggled to keep pace. He moved the exact same engine to the SNES this time, and watched as the hardware’s increased power breathed new life into the project.

As soon as you start the SNES edition, you notice that the resolution has increased slightly, since you can now see some texture on those blocks instead of simply a blank featureless slab. Instead of a dull empty area beyond the horizon, the distant surfaces now feature a simple gradient that adds depth. Instead of being thrown into an empty void, you spawn in a simple yet intriguingly diverse generated terrain. Breaking and laying blocks is still effective, and you may now save your worlds. If you just want to build without worrying about hills getting in the way, a flat creative map awaits you, and you even get a second little dimension to screw around in that functions as the Nether, with the ability to switch between the two.

Remember that all of this is taking place on plain old SNES silicon; no questionable enhancement chips were used this time. Tobi wanted to explore how far he could push the original hardware before somebody busts out the 3D assistants that let Star Fox work so smoothly. As you’d imagine, it’s not silky smooth by modern standards, but it’s still well-behaved enough to give the idea that you’re playing a real game rather than a tech demo about to collapse under its own weight. Of course, the SNES controller comes in handy, as those extra buttons provide many more control choices than the Game Boy Color ever had, even if not all of them are now connected.

Performance-wise, the SNES version falls halfway between the early Game Boy Color effort and the more powerful Game Boy Advance version Tobi has also been working on. This time, the SNES is able to draw a crisper picture, and the side textures do not cause it to choke as soon as they did on the Game Boy. In fact, some of the work he did on this port was included back into the GBA project to help with render distance. As you’d imagine, the SNES is still confined to whatever clever stuff with sprites and transformations the hardware can handle on its own, as actual polygons would require assistance from an add-on chip, which Tobi has already identified as a direction to play with in the future.

So, if you have a flash cartridge or a compatible SNES setup, you can now download the ROM from his Patreon page and begin digging your way to riches in the SNES version of Minecraft. On the initial boot, you will be greeted with a small generated environment, and the flat option is only a click away if you want to build some crazy stuff without the hills in the way. If you dislike the texture-on-blocks style, you may disable it and opt for a darker, gradient-y design instead.
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