What do the musicians Buddy Holly, Jimi Hendrix, Stevie Ray Vaughan, George Harrison, and Yngwie Malmsteen all have in common? If you said, "they're all dead," you're not far off, but I should note that Yngwie only looks dead. I would guess they probably have (or had) quite a few things in common, but as it specifically relates to this topic, the answer is that their primary guitars of choice are/were Fender Stratocasters. All jokes about Yngwie Malmsteen aside, the Stratocaster (generally just called a "Strat") has been played by a ton of world-class guitarists since its release in 1954. Spurred on by its extensive list of high-profile players across many genres of music, it is unsurprisingly one of the best-selling Fender guitars -- really, guitars of any brand -- of all time. How can you possibly improve on perfection?
Enter the Superstrat. Before I get into what a Superstrat is and why there is even a need for such a thing, we should probably talk about the regular Strat a little bit more. Obviously, if you have even a mild amount of experience or familiarity with electric guitars, you know what a Stratocaster is. For people who maybe don't know a whole lot about them, it's instructive to close your eyes and picture what an electric guitar looks like. I'm willing to bet that something closely resembling this is what pops into the heads of most people who are given that prompt. The Stratocaster was the first guitar to feature that iconic double cutaway look, i.e., the "horns" on either side of the body. Electric guitars up to that point -- including Fender's other timeless design, the Telecaster -- for the most part emulated the appearance of earlier acoustic and/or classical guitars in terms of overall body-shape.
What is a Stratocaster?
Like essentially all Fender electric guitars, the neck of the Stratocaster has 21 frets. The Stratocaster has 3 single-coil pickups, with one positioned near the bridge, one near the neck, and one in-between (for reference, if you still have that picture I linked to open, the pickups are those long white ovals with the small metal circles behind the strings; those are the things that pick up the sound of the guitar being played and make it go through an amplifier). The Strat also features what is called a floating tremolo, which is what that little metal stick at the bottom of the strings in the picture is connected to; a lot of people call that the whammy bar and that's what allows the player to rapidly bend notes lower in pitch and then bring them back to normal.
Now I'm willing to bet that if you're not a guitar person, reading all of that probably struck you as some type of word salad and your eyes completely glazed over. You're probably thinking "uh...is that stuff good?" And the answer is...sort of. Those features are "good" in the same way that a top-of-the-line PC built in 1999 is good. That is to say, at the time it came out, it was absolutely cutting-edge, but the inexorable march of time brings with it countless innovations that eventually supplant the previous standards. By the 1970s, however, the Stratocaster was showing its age. There wasn't anything wrong with it, but Strat players wanted something new. Leo Fender -- the company's namesake -- was notoriously conservative and protective of his designs, including the Strat. Fender's basic philosophy was "if it ain't broke, don't fix it." That's fair enough, but in this case it wasn't so much fixing something that isn't broken as it was a business leaving a void in its product line that other competitors could (and would) fill.
Limitations
The specs I dumped on you earlier were the main points of contention for Strat players looking for a change. A guitar with 21 frets is perfectly adequate for most people, but when you play at the level of the musicians I mentioned earlier, that's leaving a lot of notes on the table. For those who don't know, it takes 12 frets on a guitar to go up one octave; 21 is pretty close to 24, which is a nice even number that just coincidentally happens to represent two full octaves. It wouldn't be THAT hard to add just a few more frets on a slightly longer neck.
The single-coil pickups were, again, adequate for most people, but not for a lot of players in the hard rock and heavy metal worlds. As distortion effects became more prominent and more intense in the 1970s and 1980s, the Strat's pickups were prone to feeding back and creating a somewhat muddled sound. The technology to remedy this already existed (most notably in a type of pickup known as a humbucker) but Fender was uninterested in incorporating it into their Stratocasters. The final issue was the floating tremolo. Without going into too much detail, a floating tremolo is easier to design and implement than its primary alternative, but it has two main drawbacks: first, the player can only use it to lower pitch, and second, using it can immediately knock the guitar out of tune. Locking tremolo systems already existed (and overcame the drawbacks I mentioned), but as with humbuckers, Fender was not inclined to add them to their Stratocasters.
By the late 1970s, individual Stratocaster owners were already modifying their guitars to combat these problems. Although he was not the first, surely the most famous Strat modder was a young man named Eddie Van Halen. In 1977, Van Halen made substantial changes to a Stratocaster, most notably replacing the single-coil pickups with Gibson humbuckers and adding a locking tremolo system. The result has come to be known as the Frankenstrat. While the Frankenstrat has an appearance that could best be described as "post-apocalyptic," this is the guitar that produced some of Van Halen's best and most notable work. One ought not try to fix the unbroken, but it's hard to argue with success. The Frankenstrat was the template for the type of guitar that would go on to be called the Superstrat.
Explosion of the Superstrat Market
It's unclear exactly when commercial development of the first Superstrat(s) started. A good contender would be the Jackson Soloist, which entered the prototype stages in 1981. While Stratocaster clones had been produced before, they existed in something of a legal grey area due to the fact that the overall shape of the Stratocaster was extremely recognizable (and therefore protectable under American law). Any major guitar manufacturer looking to capitalize on Fender's unwillingness to break with tradition had to tread carefully. To that end, the guitars that would go on to fit into the Superstrat category featured subtle cosmetic changes, most notably thinner and sharper "horns" that were ostensibly redesigned to allow the player to have easier access to the higher frets. This change also had the effect of giving Superstrats "edgier" appearances compared to the by-now familiar Stratocaster look.
The first verifiable commercial release of a Superstrat occurred in 1983 with Kramer's Baretta. The Baretta made use of the Stratocaster's general shape (with the different look of the horns described above), but incorporated both a locking tremolo and a single humbucking pickup. It was designed with Eddie Van Halen in mind, and while he did use the guitar, he never played it in a live setting. The aforementioned Jackson Soloist was released the following year, and it included a more "aggressive" take on the standard Strat look, as well as one humbucker (in addition to 2 single-coil pickups), a locking tremolo, and a 24-fret neck. The Soloist also featured what is called neck-thru construction, meaning that the body and the neck of the guitar are made from one huge piece of wood, which gives the guitar a richer and more consistent sound; this is in contrast to Fender's standard bolt-on method of construction, where the neck and the body are two separate pieces of wood bolted together (this allows for easier mass production and repair/replacement). Jackson would also go on to release another Superstrat called the Dinky, which is essentially a 7/8 scale version of the Soloist with most of the same technical features but a bolt-on neck meant to reduce costs.
Similar offerings from companies like Yamaha, Dean, Schecter, and ESP, among others, soon followed. The Japanese company Ibanez gained prominence and popularity in the 1980s largely through their Superstrats marketed toward players of heavy metal music. At the time, the Ibanez RG was a more affordable Superstrat option than many of the products listed above. A much higher-end and more ornate Ibanez Superstrat, called the JEM, was designed in cooperation with guitar virtuoso Steve Vai.
Not wanting to miss out, Fender's arch-rival Gibson began producing their own Superstrats in the 1980s as well. Gibson is the company behind multiple iconic and innovative guitar designs, such as the Les Paul, the SG, the Explorer, and the Firebird. Gibson had long resisted the urge to copy Fender's designs -- presumably since they already had a well-established catalogue of famous guitar body-types -- but they took a risk and released multiple Superstrats. Their first foray into this market was the WRC, designed by former Fender and future Charvel and Jackson luthier Wayne Charvel. Other offerings included the U2 and a handful of guitars released through their budget Epiphone line. Interestingly, the estate of Jimi Hendrix would later sign a deal with Gibson to release a series of "Authentic Hendrix" guitars, including a low-quality and poorly-received copy of Hendrix's Fender Stratocaster that never even made it to the mass market.
Amusingly, Fender would belatedly (re)enter the market in 1988 with the Stratocaster HM, "HM" in this case standing for "Heavy Metal." The HM had a locking tremolo as well as at least one humbucker (depending on the model), but it stubbornly had 22 frets instead of 24. The HM was not well-received as the market it was intended for considered it too-little-too-late and Fender's dedicated customer-base viewed it as too radical of a departure from the classic Leo Fender design, leading a chastened Fender to discontinue production of the model in 1992.
Final Thoughts
The creator of the best-known early Superstrat, Eddie Van Halen, would later collaborate with multiple companies (including Fender) to produce the EVH line of guitars, some of which followed the Superstrat format. There are currently more Superstrat options available than ever, but I'm doubtful that many of them will have the kind of long-term impact that Jackson (owned by Fender since 2002) or Ibanez products had and continue to have. Between 2007 and 2017, sales of guitars in the United States decreased approximately 33.3%. There was apparently a bump in sales during 2020 and 2021 at the height of the covid-19 pandemic, but it's unclear to me whether this is going to represent a consistent rise in guitar sales or if it was an aberrant blip on the radar.
Regardless of the questionable health of the guitar industry as a whole, the Superstrat concept has proven its staying power. It's also a cautionary tale about a company resting on its laurels and missing out on a boatload of sales because it refused to adapt to a changing market. There is absolutely no reason why Fender shouldn't have utterly dominated the Superstrat category. I've personally owned multiple guitars from many of the companies listed here, including Fender, Jackson, and Ibanez, and I've obviously played many more at friends' houses or in guitar stores. The Stratocaster is unquestionably a fine instrument, but I always felt like a little kid trying on his dad's clothes when playing it; it never really "fit" me. The Jackson Soloist and Dinky, on the other hand, fit like gloves. The sound, feel, etc., were more in-line with what I wanted. Of course, the fact that Fender now owns Jackson can only be a benefit to the former, so at least the company learned SOMETHING from the whole debacle.