The best SNES sports games really do compare favorably to modern titles, even besides the nostalgia factor. The Super Nintendo era was a chapter in game industry history well before microtransactions, season passes, Ultimate Team, or soulless annualized sports title releases. Developers were just excited to see what they could make using 16 bits of data.

What they arrived at were some all-timers in gaming history. They may look primitive by modern standards, but their gameplay holds up. Because games lived and died on how they played in this era, developers weren’t trying to build games-as-a-service ecosystems, they really were just trying to make their titles as fun as possible. Well, with the honorable exception of LJN, who seemed to be trying just as tenaciously to achieve the exact opposite. Anyway: the games.

Super Mario Kart (1992)

Yes, motorsport is sport too. And frankly we’d have a go at putting Super Mario Kart on a list of the best Dreamcast RPGs too, if you let us, such is our undying love for it. Nintendo’s dev team took a number of ‘research trips’ to karting tracks during the pre-production of their latest racing title, and it was there they decided it might be fun to experiment with a ‘drifting’ mechanic that mimicked the way real karts behave. The rest is history, although how we got from that idea to throwing empty turtle shells at people around Rainbow Road is anyone’s guess. 

NBA Jam Tournament Edition (1994)

You’ll find this on our list of the best Sega Genesis sports games too, and while ‘90s kids will fight to the death over which version is superior, what we can all agree on is that being able to jump about 10,000 feet in the air to dunk is incredibly enjoyable. 

Basketball’s a subtle sport. Foot positioning, pump-fakes, and dropped shoulders are often the difference-maker on the scoresheet, and that gave 16-bit developers a heck of a task. So what NBA Jam did is simplify it, amplify it, and somehow evoke the raw distilled spirit of ‘90s cool in a deceptively straightforward 2v2 hoops sim. Amazing animations, great announcements, and a period for the league well worth reliving. 

International Superstar Soccer (1995)

The SNES was well into its adulthood by 1995, and Sony’s PlayStation was already starting to make it look a bit basic. While it couldn’t compete with PlayStation’s many polygons, what it could do instead is work every trick in the book to wring the neck of the platform. ISS represents just how far it could be pushed – the animations were incredible for the time, and included contextual stuff like backheels and diving headers, while the graphics – still 2D, mind you – had wonderful texture detail that made top-down Sensible Soccer look primitive. Winning the World Cup in this game still feels like a real achievement, and best of all it never tries to get you to spend real money on pretend player cards. 

WWF Raw (1994)

Somehow the dreaded LJN makes it onto this list, but let’s not forget how central to pop culture WWF wrestling was at the time. You knew Hulk Hogan’s face better than your own family’s in ‘94, so games like WWF Raw had massive appeal just for featuring real wrestlers, theme songs and all. The controls are pretty… mysterious. Let’s just say that. It’s all about momentum, timing, reading the manual, throwing the manual aside because it makes no sense, and just developing an intuitive understanding of the various bars, gauges and contextual moves over many, many cross-legged hours in front of the CRT TV. The good old days. 

Kirby’s Dream Course (1994)

Not to be confused with Kirby’s Dream Land, this one’s a golf game in which Kirby himself becomes the ball. Yeah. It was a bold and creative era, and there was nobody to say no to the idea of whacking a cute little mascot through labyrinthine courses without a second thought for his welfare. It’s closer to mini-golf than a day on the Links, with the added twist that courses are peppered with enemies who give Kirby power-ups when defeated. 

Ken Griffey Presents Major League Baseball (1994)

Licensing’s always been complicated in sports games. Suffice to say, it was amply exciting for the real team names and stadiums to feature in this one, even without any other real player names than Ken himself. Apparently, it came down to the game having the MLB license but not the MLBPA – go figure. Anyway, remember the way the ball bulged towards the screen when you got a really sweet contact on it? Wasn’t that satisfying? Go and set up your SNES again and make that happen. Your day will be better for it. 

Tecmo Super Bowl (1993)

There are some out there who claim, quite vehemently, that this remains the best NFL game ever made, and definitely the best sports game of the era. We’ll say this much: it’s really good. The commentary, crowd noise, and ‘hut!’ samples had incredible novelty value at the time, likewise the official NFL teams, but it was the purity of gameplay that really singled it out. When you picked the right play, watched your little collections of pixels sack the opposing QB, and enjoyed a rousing crowd cheer that sounded like an android’s best metal scream, you wouldn’t have cared how much better Madden NFL 22 would look in the future. 

Super Tennis (1991)

This one’s a bit older than most on the list, and so it doesn’t have the same flashy graphics, but Super Tennis got the opponent AI, ball behavior, and shots so right, so incredibly correct, that you could easily sit there and play an entire open before you’ve even decided if you’re going to play this game yet. The World Circuit mode gave you a massive challenge, touring between international opens, but it was in multiplayer where the real tension lay. If you think the cheesy net play in Wii Tennis gets intense, you should have come over to our buddies’ places after school circa ‘92 and watched it get real.

Written by Phil Iwaniuk on behalf of GLHF.