1994 · Super Famicom · Game story
Side Pocket: A Super Famicom Road Trip Where Every Shot Has a Second Thought
Data East’s 1994 billiards game makes a small green table feel like an American tour, a geometry lesson, and a high-wire act: call the lowest ball, nurse the cue ball, then decide whether a daring trick is worth the next miss.
In this story
- 01 A table with an itinerary
- 02 Nine is the ending, not the beginning
- 03 The cue ball gets the speaking role
- 04 Pocket Game is not a cleaning job
- 05 The table keeps a little score of fear
- 06 Trick Game turns physics into cartoon
- 07 Two players, one very small room
- 08 A small game about the next shot
A table with an itinerary
The opening promise of Side Pocket is wonderfully compact: take a cue, face a table, and make balls disappear into six pockets. Yet the Japanese Super Famicom game refuses to leave that promise in a quiet pool hall. Its one-player Pocket Game casts the player as a billiards trainee crossing America, chasing a local champion from city to city. That small framing device gives each rack a destination. A shot is not only a shot; it is the next stamp in an improbable passport made of green felt, corner pockets, and nerves. 1
It is a clever scale trick. The view does not need a huge world map or a crowd of characters to suggest travel. Instead, the changing requirements make the table itself feel like the country. Clear the object balls, satisfy the location’s condition, and the next room acquires the weight of a new town. Nintendo’s description is careful about both parts of the task: the rack must be cleared, but the city has its own score or technical demand. Simple clearance is therefore never quite enough. 1
Trivia The Super Famicom completion record describes Pocket Game as a remake of the Famicom version, but its own finish line is paired with Trick Game rather than standing alone. To call the SFC game cleared, that record requires both the travelling Pocket campaign and every trick-shot challenge. The road trip and the puzzle cabinet are two halves of the same evening at the table. 3
See it in action
Nine is the ending, not the beginning
9-ball gives Side Pocket its cleanest sentence. There are numbered object balls, and the cue ball must first strike the lowest number still on the table. Pocket the 9-ball and the game is over. The arrangement looks almost childishly direct when written down, but it changes the mood of every turn. The player is not simply shopping for an easy pocket; the next contact has been assigned. The table becomes a sequence of compulsory introductions before the final guest is allowed to leave. 1 5
That rule is what lets an indirect route feel thrilling rather than ornamental. The 9-ball may be near a pocket, but it is not automatically the ball to attack. First comes the lowest number, and then comes the question of what that collision can arrange. The best-looking stroke often has two stories: the visible path to the legal first ball and the quieter plan for the cue ball after impact. Side Pocket makes a beginner learn that billiards is a game of endings disguised as a game of beginnings. 1 2
Trivia A guide to the Super NES version notes a particularly mischievous consequence of the rule: a player can legally send the lowest ball into the 9-ball, then watch the 9-ball fall. It is a compact combination shot, but the drama comes from its legality. The game’s rule does not say the lowest ball must be pocketed first; it says that it must be contacted first. 2 1
The cue ball gets the speaking role
Side Pocket’s real star is not a striped ball or a neatly numbered target. It is the white cue ball, because the game lets the player alter where the cue strikes it. Nintendo explicitly calls out massé and jump shots as possibilities. That detail transforms the shot from a line drawn across the cloth into a physical gesture. Hit the centre and hope for a plain answer; move the contact point and the cue ball begins to negotiate with spin, lift, and the awkward little laws of a digital table. 1
The practical rhythm is satisfyingly old-fashioned. A community guide describes choosing the aim, positioning the strike point, building power, and then releasing the shot. It is not a modern analogue-stick simulation that hides its calculations behind a smooth camera. The player has to state an intention in stages. That separation makes a miss legible: too much power, the wrong contact point, a line chosen before the cue ball’s later journey had been imagined. 2 3
Trivia The Super Famicom controls give the player a small but meaningful toolkit: the directional pad aims, L and R make finer directional adjustments, B shoots, Y switches the balls to numbered display, and Y plus the directional pad selects the cue-ball contact point. In other words, Side Pocket lets a player change both what they are looking at and exactly where the imagined cue tip lands. 3
Pocket Game is not a cleaning job
Pocket Game sounds domestic, as if the task were merely to tidy every coloured ball away. Nintendo’s description says exactly that the object balls must be cleared, but then adds the touring conditions that turn the clean-up into a performance. This is the mode for players who enjoy looking at a rack as a route map. Which ball should be removed first? Which pocket preserves a useful angle? Which easy shot will strand the cue ball against a cushion and make the next one feel like punishment? 1
The answer is usually to resist the temptation of the nearest pocket. A good Pocket Game stroke has to pay for itself twice: it removes a ball and leaves the cue ball somewhere with a future. That makes the mode feel more conversational than 9-ball. There is no forced lowest target dictating the first word, so the player can compose a run—then discover that every choice has quietly narrowed the grammar of the next shot. A table cleared in the wrong order is still a table that can defeat you. 1 2
Trivia The later campaign gates do not summon a generic test. They point to particular squares in the Trick Game grid: the third puzzle on the first row, then the fourth and third puzzles on the second row, and finally the fourth puzzle on the third row. Pocket Game quietly teaches the player that a city checkpoint may demand a very specific piece of cue-ball wizardry before the journey can continue. 3
The table keeps a little score of fear
A strong run in Side Pocket has a special kind of silence. The cue ball reaches a comfortable angle, the next object ball sits near a pocket, and suddenly the whole rack looks solved. Then the game reminds the player that comfort is not completion. The traveller’s city conditions make score and technique part of the atmosphere, so the safest shot may be only temporarily safe. A player who is behind the required total is invited to see a difficult angle not as a warning but as an opportunity. 1 3
That pressure explains the game’s theatrical approach to billiards. In a real casual game, a conservative safety can be its own reward. Here, the mode wants progress, points, and a continuing journey. The result is a slightly heightened version of pool logic: control matters, but boldness can be the way to control the campaign. The trick is not to attempt every spectacular shot. It is to know when a modest follow leaves a better sequel than a heroic cannon that empties the screen of options. 1 4
Trivia The campaign’s targets climb with an almost musical regularity: 3,000 points in Los Angeles, then 4,000, 5,000, 6,000, and finally 7,000 by Atlantic City. From the second stop onward, the SFC route record also pairs the score gate with a named Trick Game challenge. The campaign therefore keeps interrupting a clean run with a dare: play well enough, then prove you can do something stranger. 3
Trick Game turns physics into cartoon
Then there is Trick Game, Side Pocket’s invitation to stop playing sensible pool for a moment. Nintendo describes it simply as a place to challenge trick shots. The phrase is enough to change the reader’s posture. Instead of surveying a normal rack for a dependable run, the player is handed a composed little puzzle and asked to make the impossible-looking route happen. Cushions, clustered balls, and strange lines stop being obstacles and become the vocabulary of a punchline. 1
This mode is where the adjustable strike point earns its keep. A massé or jump is no longer an optional flourish that might impress someone watching over your shoulder; it is a way of answering the table’s question. The SFC community reference preserves solution notation that distinguishes massé and draw-style choices, a useful reminder that these shots are not random fireworks. The game asks for a specific relationship between aim, force, and where the cue tip meets the ball. 1 3
Trivia The Super NES walkthrough counts 19 trick challenges and describes their reward screen as gradually filling in an image. Even if a player never memorises a solution, that structure changes the mood of practice. A failed attempt is not merely a botched rack; it is one more rehearsal for a tiny billiards magic trick whose ending the game is keeping just out of sight. 2
Two players, one very small room
Side Pocket does not make its social side complicated. Nintendo lists a two-player Pocket Game and a two-player 9-Ball Game alongside the solo tour and trick challenges. That is enough to produce the essential local-billiards mood: one person takes a shot, the other reads the cue ball’s destination before it stops, and both suddenly care far too much about whether a harmless contact was truly harmless. A Super Famicom pad passes across the room like a cue passed across a table. 1
The contrast between the two multiplayer options is revealing. Pocket Game lets the rack become a shared test of clearing and position; 9-ball adds the sharp little legal constraint of the lowest-numbered ball. Neither needs a huge tournament apparatus to create rivalry. The rules themselves provide the conversational hooks: an unlucky scratch, a neat combination, a miraculous leave, or the sentence every pool player dreads—“you left me that?” Side Pocket understands that billiards suspense fits comfortably in one screen. 1 5
Trivia There is a revealing asymmetry in Nintendo’s mode list: Pocket Game appears in one-player and two-player forms, while 9-Ball Game is listed as a two-player mode. The solo traveller gets the sprawling score-and-technique campaign; the strict numbered-ball duel is reserved for someone sitting beside you. Side Pocket knows which rules become sharper when another person is waiting for the controller. 1
A small game about the next shot
What remains appealing about Side Pocket is its refusal to separate technique from personality. The game can be a straightforward 9-ball duel, an American tour of increasingly demanding Pocket tables, or a cabinet of trick-shot riddles. All three activities use the same compact cast of balls and cushions, but each asks a different question of the player. Do you obey the sequence? Do you preserve the run? Or do you make the white ball behave as if it has rehearsed a stunt? 1
Its best lesson is modest and durable: never evaluate a shot only by the ball that disappears. Look at the cue ball’s exit, the next legal contact, the score requirement, and the route that has just become available or impossible. That is why the game’s explicit massé and jump options matter so much. They are not a promise that every player will become a billiards wizard. They are a promise that the table may still have an answer after the obvious line has failed. 1 2
Trivia The SFC Trick Game solutions run from board 1-1 through board 5-3: nineteen compact problems in all. Their recorded answers mix ordinary centre hits with draw, front-spin, and several massé positions. That count gives the mode a nice miniature-arcade shape. It is not one exhibition shot, but a shelf of increasingly particular little table jokes waiting to be solved. 3
A few more screens
1 official imagesSources & image credits
Facts were checked against the links below. Official media remains the property of Nintendo and the relevant rights holders.
- Nintendo Classics: サイドポケット Nintendo ↗
- Side Pocket — Guide and Walkthrough GameFAQs ↗
- サイドポケット Super Famicom Call ↗
- Side Pocket SEGA Game Honpo ↗
- Side Pocket SuperFamicom.org ↗
- サイド・ポケット｜スーパーファミコン ピコピコ大百科 / GAVAS ↗
- サイド・ポケット Super Famicom.jp ↗
- Side Pocket StrategyWiki ↗
