New worlds

But wait! At Nintendo's Kyoto headquarters, rows of programmers laboured late into the night. Behind them, Shigeru Miyamoto paced up and down, suggesting a tweak here, cuffing an ear there.

Super Mario World, it turned out, had been just the beginning. Over the months to follow, Nintendo practically haemorrhaged SNES games, all of them brilliant. Pilotwings used Mode 7 to let players soar over smooth-scrolling terrain beneath hang-gliders and parachutes. Zelda: A Link to the Past took the popular NES series into a new dimension, with sparkling graphics and a huge world to explore. Best of all, Super Mario Kart provided a racing game of knuckle-whitening intensity beneath its cute facade.

The SNES's strength in Japan gave Nintendo powerful allies, too. Konami brought their delicate touch to the machine with games like Castlevania and Super Probotector. Square and Enix continued their hyper-popular RPG lines on the SNES. And, vitally, Capcom released a perfect SNES conversion of Street Fighter II, a coin-op that was swallowing coins by the sack-load around the world.

Sega's response? Sonic 2. A flood of derivative platform games from third-party developers. And bold promises of a CD add-on for the Mega Drive that would revolutionise videogaming.

Surprisingly, this seemed to do the trick. Shops in Europe and America heaved with customers eager to pledge their lives to Sega.