Star Fox

„Do a barrel roll!“ Even someone who has never played Star Fox knows these four words — and this is exactly where they come from. In 1993 Nintendo did something on its purely 2D Super Nintendo that looked like magic: it got a genuine polygonal three-dimensional game running. The secret was hidden right inside the cartridge.

That secret was the Super FX chip, a co-processor developed by the British studio Argonaut Software, which was inserted into the game module and gave the console the computing power to render 3D polygons that the base hardware couldn't manage on its own. The result was a rail shooter in which you pilot the Arwing fighter of an animal squadron led by the fox Fox McCloud, flying through levels toward an enemy army. For most of the time the game guides you along a predefined path, but it gives you room to dodge, roll barrels (the famous „barrel roll“, which deflected shots) and choose between several difficulty routes through the galaxy.

By today's standards the graphics were blocky and short on detail, but in 1993 they felt like a glimpse of the future. The charismatic talking animals, the dramatic soundtrack and the sense of flying through real space created an experience no one had seen on consoles before. The character of Fox McCloud became a fixture of the Nintendo world and later a star of the Super Smash Bros. series.

The significance of Star Fox reaches beyond the game itself. It proved that a console could break past its limitations using add-on hardware in the cartridge, and it foreshadowed the era of 3D that the 32-bit and 64-bit consoles would fully open up a few years later. The series continued with the influential Star Fox 64 and further instalments, but that very first flight remains a historic milestone.

Why play it: It's a pioneering game that brought 3D to the SNES and is worth experiencing as both a technological and cultural landmark — plus it's the source of one of the most quoted lines in gaming history.