Super Nintendo software developer says their team had a "blast processing" technique before SEGA coined the term

Back in the days of the SNES versus Genesis, SEGA was keen on getting any leg up on the competition they could. That included an extremely aggressive marketing campaign that aimed to show the SNES as an inferior piece of hardware in every way. It was that desire to trounce Nintendo that paved the way for 'blast processing.'

Blast processing is just a buzz term that didn't mean anything, but it is rooted in a bit of fact. SEGA of America's Marty Franz discovered a method that let devs push data onto the Genesis' graphics chip while a scanline was being drawn on-screen. When his colleague Scott Bayliss heard about this, Bayliss mentioned this method of "blasting" data to the graphics chip during an interview with SEGA's PR team. The PR people loved the word 'blast,' which eventually lead to the term Blast Processing.

You might know that part of the story, but here's a tidbit that's just surfaced. Apparently another team working on the Super Nintendo were cooking up a unique development trick as well, and they also coined the term 'blast processing' internally.

Former Sculptured Software developer Jeff Peters came across an interesting audio trick when working on the SNES port of Mortal Kombat. Peters' trick was actually tied to audio instead of video, and the team took to calling it Blast Processing during development. Peters explains in the snippet below, which comes from the Arcade Perfect book.

That was before Sega adopted the slogan. We could just blast sound from the cartridge onto the game scene. That allowed us to keep the resolution and sample rate of the VO higher, as well as be able to have more sound samples to use in a given fight, or on a given level.

In other words, the SNES had its own Blast Processing as well, but the term never left the inner workings of Sculptured Software. Even if Nintendo heard of it, I doubt they would have used the buzz phrase in marketing. That wasn't really Nintendo's style back in the day. They took the high road for the most part...for better or worse.