The History of SNES Clone Consoles

Last year I took an art history class, which was an experience. I learned a lot, grew a lot academically. For the final paper I was flummoxed about what to write about (my research interests being video game nostalgia) until a story blew up my Twitter feed about a new clone console being released, the Analogue Pocket. At that point, I kind of already knew what a clone console was, owning a Chinese knockoff of the Game Boy Color at the time, and was struggling to find a way to conduct research on it.

From a phenomenon, I find it absolutely fascinating that there has been a rise in clone consoles recently. I define these as new hardware capable of playing old hardware and software. This is different than the plug-in play NES & SNES Classics, which while capable of playing older software do so by emulation (and plug-in play consoles have been around for a while, basically since the death of arcades). However, clone consoles are of especial interest to me because they seem to target two groups of people: nostalgic, older players of games that are dying/dead; collectors of older video games that want to preserve their history.

So this news story, of the Analogue Pocket, seemed to spark within me a great paper idea that I wrote for my art history class where I did two things: I tracked down and solidified a history of SNES clone consoles, trying to create an exhaustive list of them across the decades, and then I did a stylistic analysis where I traced the design geneologies of the clone consoles. While the first part of the paper I found to be important and relevant (writing an alternative history, no one really discusses clone consoles in video game history), I am tempted to make a Wikipedia page out of it. But maybe after I get this paper published.

However, in the meantime, I am going to share some of that research here to discuss what I found. Below is an abbreviated history of the SNES clone consoles (I picked this platform merely for its convenience, and might do a similar history for other platforms in the future):

1. Early video game home consoles were a wild west with copyright and intellectual property: many counterfeit Pong clones flooded the market
2. This led to the Video Game Crash of 1983, where the industry was more or less declared dead due to the flood of counterfeit and cheap imitators
3. Nintendo releases the Famicom in Japan, and due to the crash in America designed the NES to have different, but compatible hardware (starting the East/West hardware divide)
4. Later Nintendo releases the SFC in Japan and a year later the SNES in America. However, there were many markets that were excluded from Nintendo hardware (such as the USSR), some of which started releasing bootleg consoles. This included the Dendy and the Pegasus which were based on the Taiwan-made Micro Genius IQ-502 (which while NES bootlegs, were modeled after the SFC).
5. Nintendo releases the SFC Jr. and New-Style SNES (which were new versions of the same platform at the end of its lifespan).
6. In the years that followed, there were likely many bootleg consoles released, but due to the lack of historical records these are impossible to track down.
7. In 2006 the FC Twin was released, a clone console released in America.
8. The patents on the SNES and SFC expire around 2011, leading to a new wave of clone consoles such as those released by Hyperkin.
9. Nintendo taps into this new market (and likely to hold off as many consumers as possible from buying other hardware) by releasing the NES & SNES Classic consoles.
10. Today there are many clone consoles available on Amazon (such as the Supa Boy, the SupaRetron HD, the Classiq II, and the Challenger). One notable clone console that is absent from the eCommerce giant however is Analogue’s Super NT, which is the gold standard for hardware emulation and performance.

Like I mentioned earlier, this is just an abbreviated, high-level kind of history. But I tried to track when every product came to market, and document them as much as possible. Many of these products (while on Amazon) don’t have royalty-free images, which is important for documentation and preservation purposes. I hope to eventually discuss more about the history of SNES clone consoles in my upcoming paper that could be in an academic journal (if things go well) and also my upcoming Wikipedia page.