SNES 35th Anniversary Highlights 10 Game Series Born on Nintendo's 1991 Console

Q: How did a bizarre legal split turn one of the SNES's most peaceful farming simulators into two competing modern rival franchises?

It happened because the original SNES series kept its developer, but not its English title. The farming franchise that began on the SNES in 1996 was created in Japan as **Bokujō Monogatari** by Yasuhiro Wada and developed by Victor Interactive, later part of **Marvelous**. In North America, those games were published and localized for years by **Natsume** under the English brand name **Harvest Moon**. That meant Western players came to know the Marvelous-made series by a title Natsume controlled. The split came in **2012**, when Marvelous stopped licensing the Harvest Moon name to Natsume and shifted Western publishing to its own company, **Xseed**. But Natsume retained rights to the **Harvest Moon** trademark in the West. So when Marvelous continued the original series overseas, it could no longer use the name fans recognized and had to relaunch it as **Story of Seasons** beginning in 2014. At the same time, Natsume used the trademark it still owned to create its **own separate Harvest Moon games**, starting with **Harvest Moon: The Lost Valley**. That left the market with two rival lines: **Story of Seasons**, which is the continuation of the original Japanese SNES-born franchise, and **Harvest Moon**, which became a different Natsume-developed series sharing the old Western name. The result is one of gaming’s oddest brand divorces: the original Harvest Moon became Story of Seasons, while Harvest Moon itself continued as something else.

3 articles · Updated · Polygon · Aug 22

Nintendo's Super Nintendo turns 35 on Aug. 23, marking the anniversary with a retrospective on 10 major franchises that debuted on the 16-bit console.
The list spans RPGs, racers and shooters, including Star Fox, Harvest Moon, Chrono, Mario Kart, Star Ocean, Mega Man X, Breath of Fire, Tales, Ogre Battle and Lufia.
Several picks remain commercially or culturally significant: Mario Kart 8 has sold nearly 80 million copies as of June 2026, while Tales has run for three decades and Star Fox returned on Switch 2 this year.
The roundup also underscores how uneven those legacies have been, with series such as Breath of Fire, Chrono and Lufia largely dormant despite enduring fan demand.