Star Fox SNES

Star Fox is Nintendo’s 1993 rail shooter, notable as the first console game to ship with a dedicated custom chip — the Super FX — bolted onto the cartridge to give the SNES enough extra processing power to render real-time 3D polygons, something the base hardware couldn’t do on its own.

You pilot an Arwing starfighter as part of a mercenary team defending the Lylat system from Andross, choosing between multiple branching flight paths across each mission. The polygonal visuals were primitive even by 1993 standards, but the underlying hardware trick proved influential enough that Nintendo reused Super FX chips in several later SNES titles.