What If the Nintendo Play Station was actually released?

Hey everybody, and welcome to Sportskeeda Esport's latest weekly feature: "What If?"

As an entertainment medium, video games have had a relatively short but eventful history. What started out as a goofy side project in a laboratory on an oscilloscope has become the most profitable form of entertainment in the world. Over the years, companies have risen and then fallen and then risen again, not unlike some of the great companies in both American and World history.

As with any history topic, questions can arise - how certain events, if played out differently, would have changed how the rest of the history unfolds. It's known as the "Butterfly Effect" - if a butterfly flaps is wings in Brazil, Ashton Kutcher makes a terrible movie in America. Or something like that.

Sony is pretty much the biggest name in console gaming right now - so much so that it's basically the tentpole of their entire company. And understandably so - it's their biggest revenue producer. It'd not like they're really making TVs or laptop computers anymore. Kinf of a shame... those laptops were pretty dope. Sorry, getting off track.

Nintendo, on the other hand, is certainly still successful but they're no longer the market leading juggernaut they were in the 1980s and 90s. Of course, they rocked the business big time with the Wii, it become one of the best selling video game consoles of all time. Even the Switch is flying off the shelves - despite the fact that it barely has any big name third party support. Microsoft is also out there, too, but they're not involved with this scenario so we don't give a darn.

But, at one point, the two almost joined forces - and if they had, gaming could, and most likely would, be looking a lot different than it does now. So, what happened? And how would it look today if that were the case.

Well, that's what we're here to examine today. But first, in the words of Cody from AlternateHistoryHub, some context...

So, what actually happened...?

In 1988, Nintendo was the biggest name in video games pretty much across the entire world. Both the Nintendo Family Computer (Japan) and the Nintendo Entertainment System (pretty much everywhere else) were still selling extremely well in their territories and competition was nearly nonexistent.

Nearly.

By 1988, there were two technologically superior challengers in the marketplace: NEC's PC Engine and Sega's Mega Drive (or TurboGraphx-16 and Genesis, respectively, in North America) 16-bit consoles were on the shelves and while the Famicom/NES were still technically outselling them (although, in Japan, that didn't last very long, but that's a whole different story), it was clear that these higher-powered systems were the future and Nintendo couldn't wait forever if they intended to catch up.

Nintendo began work on designing the Super Famicom (or Super Nintendo Entertainment System everywhere else) in 1988 and inside the casing was a sound chip developed by Sony's own Ken Kutaragi. He's important, remember him. This led to a joint collaboration between the two companies to create a CD-Rom drive add-on for the upcoming Super NES. It was to be called the Nintendo Play Station. And, yeah, there's a space in there.

Then things went haywire.

Relations between the two companies began to sour, as it can do with businesses, when problems arose - and you're never gonna believe this - over money. The exact details aren't important, but essentially, not only did Sony retain the right to make their own Sony-branded system that played both discs and SNES games down the road, but Sony collected royalties and retained the rights on any software developed on their hardware. Basically, it was a bad deal for Nintendo... who really should have maybe known that before they signed.

It's fairly interesting that this CES was the last time the show was held both in the summer and in Chicago. For it was at this event where things really went bananas, and set in motion events that would forever change the video game industry.

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...

Remember the Turbographx-CD? Probably not

As mentioned before, Nintendo broke off the partnership with Sony after they realized they were getting the short end of the stick, financially speaking. But, what if that wasn't the case? What if the terms had been negotiated and the SNES-CD/Play Station had been released as planned? What would the gaming world look like?

Even without the potential competition from Nintendo, both NEC and Sega's CD-ROM add-ons did pretty poorly, both in sales and reception. Neither had a library of games that encouraged owners to shell out a couple hundred extra bucks to play games on a system they already owned - or most likely didn't already own, in the case of the Turbograpfx-16 (come on, only, like, six people owned that thing in the US).

On top of that, one of the games that the US government's hearings on video game violence centered around was Night Trap - which was a Sega CD exclusive. Parents were certainly not about to pay for a system that played that game, even if the scrutiny was unwarranted.

If Nintendo and Sony had released the Play Station as planned, it's not as if they would have a lot of stiff competition. But, would Nintendo still be able to play nice with others? Would the Play Station be able to succeed where the Sega and Turbografx CDs failed?

Let's say they could, and did...

The original Sony PlayStation, from our timeline

We still would have probably gotten the Sony PlayStation (one word)

As mentioned before (you're paying attention, right?), part of Sony's deal with Nintendo was allowing Sony to release their own branded console that played both cartridge and SNES-CD games. Even if the financial terms of that agreement (the ones that caused the split in the first place) had been changed to the point that Nintendo would be agreeable to them, it's more than likely that this clause would remain.

It's worth considering, however, that if Sony wasn't getting as much revenue from the games on SNES-CD as the original agreement had stated, they wouldn't have had a whole lot of incentive to make their own version of the Nintendo Play Station. However, it would have gotten into the gaming business to begin with, and with more of a head start than they actually did now.

So, not only would Sony be a name associated with gaming by the time they released their own PlayStation, they would have also had the experience in creating gaming hardware, avoiding any mistakes and bugs that occurred in the real timeline.

Essentially, Sony would have been, more or less, a console generation ahead of everyone.

Then again, so would Nintendo...

Still image from the Final Fantasy VI Interative SGI demo

Nintendo embraces CDs

One of the biggest mistakes Nintendo made in the co-called 32-bit Era - at least in the opinion of myself and many others, especially on the Internet - was their decision to continue to put their games on cartridges as opposed to discs. From a certain standpoint, you can see why they did: better control over piracy and the failure of the other CD-based add-ons among them. It was a gamble and, in the long term, it didn't really pay off. Traditionally loyal third party publishers left Nintendo in the dust in order to take advantage of the PlayStation's robust CD-based format and ease of programming in their hardware.

If the Play Station had been both released and successful, however, that should have quashed any hesitation the company would have had in using the format for future consoles. And while they may or may not have been able to use the SNES-CD hardware specs for whatever the Nintendo 64 would become in this timeline, they would have enough experience in working with it to at least duplicate it somewhat.

This means that developers like Squaresoft and others would now have an incentive to keep their games on Nintendo hardware - and this tech demo featuring Final Fantasy VI characters on Nintendo 64 hardware might have actually become a real game.

The distinguished competition

That's all well and good, but what about Sega? Or Microsoft, who would eventually enter the arena in the following generation?

When Sega released the Saturn in the US - and after the debacles of the Sega CD and 32X (the less said about that last one, the better) - Sony was actually the competition they feared the most. The PlayStation and Saturn's sales were pretty close in Japan, and the Nintendo 64 was still two years away. Sega made the mistake of releasing the Saturn to the US market a good four months earlier than planned, leaving both customers and developers surprised and ill prepared.

It was the beginning of the end for Sega's hardware business. It's hard to say if Sega would have made the same move if a CD-based Nintendo console had been released around the same time. Waiting would have meant a better hardware launch, more than likely meaning more success and improved consumer confidence following the failure of the Genesis add-ons. (My prediction is that the reputation that those add-ons gave Sega possibly would have still hurt the Saturn's sales here as they did in our timeline, but not nearly as much.)

As for Microsoft and their Xbox, it's really a toss up depending on the success of their competitors. If all three consoles were performing well financially, they may simply consider the market not worth getting into. They could have very well began concentrating on the even-then growing PC gaming market. But, we'll get to that.

The N64DD - not the kind of discs we were thinking of

What about today?

So, where does this scenario bring us to when it reaches 2019? It's, obviously, impossible to say for absolute certainty. But we've come this far, so we might as well

Surprisingly, I actually picture Sega still making hardware, even now - provided that Nintendo releases their... whatever their version of the N64 is in this timeline... at the same time as Sony releases theirs. It's a pretty good possibility, since they both just finished designing hardware together a generation earlier. I'm guessing that two competitors in 1994 instead of one would be enough for even the hard headed executives at Sega of Japan to reconsider the Saturn's early U.S. launch. That should have at least given them the chance to improve the U.S. launch and be competitive.

It's always possible that Nintendo and Sony actually wind up enjoying working together... or at least see continuing to be partners more profitable for them both than competing. I find that highly unlikely. Even though Nintendo's snub at the CES was what got them motivated to release the Play Station (two words), I have a feeling we would have eventually seen the PlayStation (one word).

Nintendo, on the other hand, would have more than likely adopted the CD format - although whatever new system they used it with would still be weird somehow. This is Nintendo we're talking about here. Chances are they still would have used Silicon Graphics's 3D technology they used in the N64 - combining that with the improved memory that CDs have over cartridges - and you could have had something special.

It would have certainly fared better than the 64DD, that's for sure.

Would this even exist in our new timeline?

OK, but still... what about today?

Oh, right. Sorry.

So, as I said, we'd more than likely still have Sega producing console hardware - if not thriving, then more than likely hanging in there, much like how Nintendo was with the GameCube.

Speaking of Nintendo, there's a good chance that if this timeline had come to pass, we wouldn't have gotten the Wii - at least not as we know it. The Wii came about with Nintendo desperately needing to find a way to stand-out from the other companies and their focus on hardware specs and home media capabilities. We could have very well seen a Wii, still with the motion controls but with the HD output and other specs of the Wii U. Or, they might have come up with something completely now. Again, this is Nintendo, we're probably talking about something weird. Fun! But weird.

Microsoft? They're not in the hardware business in this timeline. When they launched the Xbox, Sega was on their last legs as a hardware developer. As great as the Dreamcast was, once the specs and capabilities of the PS2 came out - especially its ability to play DVDs - we all knew it wasn't going to last.

In this new timeline, Microsoft looks at a game hardware market with three thriving (or two thriving and one pretty close to thriving) competitors and simply going "nope". Give Dean Takahashi's book "Opening the Xbox: Inside Microsoft's Plan to Unleash an Entertainment Revolution*" to see what a pain in the butt it was just to get the thing approved and made in the first place.

More than likely, the House that Bill Built would focus on what brought 'em to the dance - the PC. Improving Direct X (the graphics software the original Xbox was powered by to begin with) and trying to make PC gaming more accessible would probably be their goals here. After all, look at what they're doing in the PC market right now.

So, while we'd still have three consoles on the market, we'd also have three different companies, too. Media capability and apps would still be important, but we'd probably also see more improved hardware than we do now. And we might even have a more robust PC gaming market, too - and it's already pretty robust.

On to next week...

Now, of course, there's a ton of variables here that could be considered - other companies like SNK or, you know, Philips, and the like - but this thing is already ten pages and I want to go home and see my family. But that's just one way this could have all turned out. Whether or not it would, well, we'll never know so it's possible I'm right on the money so ha ha.

Either way, we have what we got and, let's face it: it's not that bad.

Thanks for checking out the first edition of "What If...?" Next week, we'll be looking at the world of WWE games and asking "What if Yuke's was never hired to make WWE games?" If that sounds confusing, you clearly don't play WWE games but, fear not, we'll explain everything.

Just for fun, here's a look at all the other game companies at the 1991 Summer CES. (If it starts at the beginning, just jump to 18:05. The rest of it is about VCRs and printers and crap)

If you have any ideas for a possible subject (or better name for this thing) or if you want to agree or disagree with our theories, please let us know in the comments below. Or hit me up on Twitter: @KevinSkGaming.

And, as always, you can stay up to date with the latest in video game and esports news at Sportskeeda Esports.

See you next time!