What If the Nintendo Play Station was actually released?

Chicago, IL - site of the 1991 Summer Consumer Electronics Show

The snub heard around the (gaming) world

At the Summer CES - just months after the Super Nintendo was announced at the Winter CES - Sony announced that they were working with Nintendo to design and produce an add-on for the SNES that would play games on CD-ROM. It was called the Nintendo Play Station (two words) - also known as the SNES-CD.

NEC had already gotten into the Games-On-CD market with the Turbografx-CD, and Sega was only days away from announcing their own CD add on, the Sega CD, for the Genesis. But, this was different. It was one of the biggest electronic companies in the world getting into the video game business, and it was with a partnership with the biggest video game company on the planet.

However, just 24 hours later, Nintendo announced that they did have a CD-ROM add on for the SNES in the works. It just wasn’t going to be made by Sony. They had broken off the deal with Sony and, instead, were working with Sony’s competitor, Phillips, to develop it instead.

Uh, oh.

Sony, furious and humiliated (and remember, these are Japanese businesses- saying they take being embarrassed seriously is an understatement) ordered Kutaragi (who, also, had to have been pretty cheesed) to take the technology that had already developed and, instead, create a their own disc-based gaming system. At the end of 1994, the Sony PlayStation was released in Japan and quickly became the best selling system in the world.

Nintendo never did release that CD add-on they had planned with Phillips. Instead, they released the cartridge-based Nintendo 64 (which didn’t sell too badly itself - just nowhere near PSX numbers), while Phillips released their own disc-based console, the CD-i, which didn’t sell particularly well. At all. Oh, also, because of the deal with Nintendo, they retained the rights to use a small number of Nintendo-owned characters for CD-i which, I guess to stay consistent, were also terrible.

So, What if… the deal with Sony never fell through and the Nintendo Play Station was actually released? I think it would go a little something like this...