It’s still insane to me how well they managed to port Killer Instinct to the SNES. Considering the hardware limitations, the port was insane and played incredibly close to the arcade version.
I still look back so fondly to that time because they absolutely pushed the SNES to the limit and then some with games like Killer Instinct, Donkey Kong Country, Super Mario RPG.
Oh, and Doom. Unlike the other games I mentioned, I wouldn’t consider Doom on the SNES as good – but the fact they were able to get a playable Doom on the SNES is an engineering marvel. Accomplishments like that from the old school game designers are truly so impressive.
Doom was pretty nuts. They managed to fit 22 out of 27 levels into half the space of the PC version as well. Obviously it wasn’t a 1:1 port, but they did amazing work considering the limitations.
IIRC the developer made the SNES version of Doom from the ground-up as well, no source code.
Surprisingly enough, I remember the best console port of Doom being the Atari Jaguar version for a long time before the PS1 version hit.
There was a podcast recently with the guy who built the SNES port, it was pretty interesting.