The North American Super Nintendo looked...OK. The Japanese and PAL version looked hot. Oh, how things could have turned out differently, had early concept art become reality.
These two early designs for the SNES, drawn at a time when they were still calling the machine the "Nintendo Entertainment System 2", were hideous. Where the final designs were almost timeless, these are very much products of the late 1980s.
They appeared in the June 1991 issue of Nintendo Power. Presumably in a story called "the hellish hardware of the future we mercifully avoided".
Total Recall is a look back at the history of video games through their characters, franchises, developers and trends. You'll find Total Recall stories every Tue-Fri between 1am -2am Eastern.