Mode 7 Magic

Video games have come a far way since Nintendo revitalized the entire industry in 1985. When the video game industry crumbled in 1983, no one ever would have thought that a Japanese card-making company that had never worked on a video game before, let alone a console, would singlehandedly bring the industry back from the brink. Nobody can say for sure that video games would not have come back at some point, but Nintendo broke out and stayed on top for a decade. After the success of the Nintendo Entertainment System and increasing competition from the more advanced Sega Genesis console, Nintendo developed and released the Super Nintendo Entertainment System in 1990 to commercial and critical success. Graphics Mode 7 was one of the top selling points of the SNES and the impact of the faux 3-D effects had on game developers can be found if magnified. While the tremors it generated cannot easily be found today; it would be remiss to say that it did not pioneer a generation, arguably the principal generation of video games, that produced some of the greatest games ever made.

Mode 7 played a large part in the success of the SNES and the effects it achieved on the console had an extensive impact on video games and their presentation at large. Before that point, video games could present scope on a 2-D plane, but not on anything resembling a z-axis. There is a depth missing when going back to play those games that released on the NES and even the SNES’s contemporary, the Sega Genesis. While the SNES could not render real 3-D, at least not until Nintendo developed the Super FX chip in 1993, the system could create the illusion that a 3-D plane was being displayed in front of your eyes. It is an illusion that is possible with Mode 7. Racing through the alien worlds of F-Zero, exploring the sprawling world map of Final Fantasy VI (titled Final Fantasy III when it was first released) with the airship Blackjack, and landing a plane in Pilotwings were among the visual and gameplay achievements made with the capabilities of Mode 7.

The way the SNES and Mode 7 manage to achieve this kind of visual trickery involves some math. Without diving into equations that I do not understand, there are 8 different graphics modes. Mode 7 is the last one and, of course, is the coolest. It generates a single background layer that can be warped and rotated as the player moves on a flat plane and the background scales accordingly. The layer is a flat image that is stretched to wrap around an axis without warping the image itself. This gives the illusion that there is a 3-D perspective that the player is traversing through and making the horizontal plane extend into the horizon. Because there is not a real third dimension to the graphics, the horizon goes on forever and there is no skybox that stops you from traveling outside a “boundary”. In real 3-D video games, the skybox will eventually stop and can no longer be explored. On a an SNES game, the background layer is unreachable and there is not a second horizontal plane to serve as an atmosphere. These are the limitations, but they did not matter in 1990.

F-Zero, a launch game for the SNES, showed off the possibilities of Mode 7 right off the bat. You pick your racer and rather than having a side view or top-down view, you have a pseudo-third person perspective of. The multiple perspectives of the ship sell the appearance of a 3-D environment. There was a ridiculous commercial that showed off what it would be like to play F-Zero and move at blistering speeds on a track with a dynamic background. It sold the idea that you were playing on a 3-D environment. The Sega Genesis had no equivalent to Mode 7 without the help of an add-on like the 32X. These factors made the SNES stand out at launch and making F-Zero the ultimate demo for new technology. It is empowering that so much could be achieved visually with so little, it is inspiring.

All this information was from a time when almost no one outside of Nintendo knew how these things worked. If they did, it would not have mattered anyway. Mode 7 is one of a kind and the SNES stood out from the pack with faux 3-D. It reminds me of the work of M.C. Escher and the cultivation of 3-D perspectives from a 2-D object. It is art in the most technologically impressive way possible. Video games have been 3-D for quite some time now, so something like this may not seem impressive, but for its time the effects were one of a kind and unknowable anywhere else.