What Materials Were Used to Create the SNES?

The Super Nintendo Entertainment System — better known as the SNES — is one of the most iconic gaming consoles ever made. Released in Japan in 1990 and North America in 1991, it was an engineering product of its time. Understanding what it was physically made of tells you a lot about 1990s consumer electronics manufacturing, and why these consoles age the way they do.

The Outer Shell: ABS Plastic

The most visible material in the SNES is ABS (Acrylonitrile Butadiene Styrene) plastic. This is a rigid, impact-resistant thermoplastic that was — and still is — standard in consumer electronics and appliance housings.

Nintendo used ABS plastic for:

• The main console housing
• The cartridge door and slot cover
• The controller shells
• The button caps and D-pad

ABS was chosen for good reasons. It's lightweight, easy to injection-mold into complex shapes, holds paint and surface texture well, and provides reasonable durability for everyday handling.

The specific color Nintendo used — a light gray with subtle purple accents on the North American model, and a darker charcoal-gray for the Japanese Super Famicom — was mixed directly into the plastic compound during manufacturing. This is called pigmented molding, and it's one reason why the color is consistent through the plastic, not just on the surface.

Why Does the SNES Turn Yellow? 🟡

If you've ever seen an aging SNES with yellowed plastic, that's a direct result of the materials used. Nintendo (like most electronics manufacturers of the era) added flame retardant compounds — specifically bromine-based additives — to the ABS plastic to meet fire safety standards.

Over time, exposure to UV light and oxygen causes these bromine compounds to break down and migrate to the surface, producing that characteristic yellow discoloration. This is called bromine oxidation or thermal degradation, not just sun damage. It affects the inside of stored consoles too, though more slowly.

This isn't a defect in manufacturing — it was an accepted trade-off with the fire safety standards of the time.

Internal Components: PCB, Silicon, and Metal

Inside the housing, the SNES is built around a printed circuit board (PCB) made from FR4 fiberglass-reinforced epoxy laminate — the standard material for rigid PCBs in consumer electronics. The board is coated with a solder mask (typically green, though the exact shade varied) and populated with components via through-hole and surface-mount soldering techniques.

The key chips on the SNES motherboard include:

The cartridge connector deserves a note: it used gold-plated copper pin contacts to ensure reliable electrical conductivity and corrosion resistance over thousands of insertions. This is why old cartridges often still work after cleaning — gold doesn't oxidize the way bare copper does.

The Cartridges Themselves

SNES game cartridges were also primarily ABS plastic for the shell, with an internal PCB made from the same FR4 fiberglass laminate as the console. The game data was stored on ROM chips (Read-Only Memory) — silicon-based integrated circuits with data permanently encoded during manufacturing.

Some cartridges also included:

• SRAM (Static RAM) chips for save data
• A small CR2032 lithium coin cell battery to keep the SRAM powered when the cartridge was unplugged
• In advanced titles, additional chips like the Super FX or SA-1 co-processors, also silicon-based

Many save files lost over the decades are a direct result of those coin cell batteries depleting — they were never designed to last 30+ years.

Controllers: Rubber, Plastic, and Copper Contacts

The SNES controller combined the ABS plastic shell with carbon-impregnated rubber membranes beneath the face buttons. When you press a button, the rubber dome compresses and a carbon contact bridges two copper traces on a small PCB inside the controller — completing the circuit.

This rubber dome contact design was inexpensive, reliable for millions of presses, and contributed to the distinctive tactile feel of SNES buttons. The iconic ABXY colored buttons (purple, yellow, blue, green) were molded from ABS with color mixed into the plastic itself.

The D-pad used a cross-shaped rubber membrane with a similar carbon contact mechanism — the same fundamental design Nintendo had refined since the NES.

Screws, Shielding, and the Small Details

Inside the console, Nintendo used steel RF shielding — thin metal sheets folded around sensitive PCB sections to reduce electromagnetic interference. Fasteners were standard Phillips-head steel machine screws, with some models using Nintendo's proprietary Gamebit security screws on cartridges to discourage unauthorized opening.

The power supply circuitry included aluminum electrolytic capacitors — components that are, notably, one of the more failure-prone parts in aging consoles. Electrolytic capacitors dry out over decades, which is why SNES recapping (replacing old capacitors) is a common retro hardware maintenance practice today. 🔧

What This Means for Modern Owners

The material choices Nintendo made in 1990–1991 reflected the best available mass-production options at the time. ABS plastic with bromine flame retardants, FR4 PCBs, silicon chips, and carbon-contact controllers were all industry-standard choices — not cutting corners.

Whether an original SNES holds up today depends heavily on how it was stored (UV exposure, temperature, humidity), whether the capacitors have degraded, and the condition of the cartridge connector contacts. Two consoles made from identical materials and on the same production line can be in dramatically different condition thirty years later purely because of where they spent those decades.

The materials tell you what the console was. The environment and usage history tell you what condition it's in now.