Sony/Nintendo Play Station

You read the title right the Sony/Nintendo Play Station. It was the Super Famicom(SNES) with a CD drive. It was shown of as CES but the next day Nintendo pulled the plug on it and it was never realeased outside of the few prototypes that excistes. Lets take a look at the history of the Nintendo Play Station.

Sony engineer Ken Kutaragi became interested in working with video games after seeing his daughter play games on the Famicom. He took on a contract at Sony for developing hardware that would drive the audio subsystem of Nintendo's next console, the SNES. Kutaragi secretly developed the chip, the Sony SPC 700. Sony was not interested in the video game market, his superiors did not approve of the project, but Kutaragi found support in Sony executive Norio Ohga so the project was allowed to continue. The success of the project had Nintendo to enter into a partnership with Sony to develop both a CD-ROM add-on for the Super NES and a Sony-branded console that would play both SNES cartridges, as well as games released for the Super Disc. Development on the format started in 1988. Nintendo signed a contract with Sony to produce a CD-ROM add-on for the SNES. The system was to be compatible with SNES cartridges as well as titles for the Super Disc format. Under their agreement, Sony would develop and retain control over the Super Disc format, with Nintendo effectively ceding a large amount of control of software licensing to Sony. Sony would also be the sole benefactor of licensing related to music and movies software that it had been aggressively pursuing as a secondary application. Nintendo's president Hiroshi Yamauchi was already wary of Sony at this point and deemed it unacceptable, as Sony was the sole provider of the audio chip, the S-SMP, used in the SNES and required developers to pay for an expensive development tool from Sony. Yamauchi started to see a more favorable partner, Philips. Philips was also one of Sony's biggest rivals in the entire industry. So in order to counter the proposed agreement, Yamauchi sent Nintendo of America president Minoru Arakawa, and executive Howard Lincoln to the Netherlands to negotiate a more favorable contract with Philips. At the June 1991 Consumer Electronics Show, Sony announced its SNES-compatible cartridge/CD console, the "PlayStation". The next day, Nintendo revealed its partnership with Philips at the show which was a surprise to the entire audience, and Sony.

What is the Super Disk? The super disk we are talking about is a special CD fromat for the Nintendo Play Station.

About two and three hundred prototypes of the Nintendo Play Station were created, and software for the system was being developed. In 1992, a deal was reached allowing Sony to produce SNES-compatible hardware, with Nintendo retaining control and profit over the games. The two organizations never repaired the disagreement between them. By the next year, Sony had dropped development of the SNES CD-ROM, and instead its efforts on developing its own console for the next generation of which would become known as the PlayStation. Meaning Nintendo created their own Enemy. Unfrtuanatly the Philips disk system would also never be realeased, there was an agreement that Sony could make games with Nintendo charecters on there new Video Game/All in one multimedia device the CD-i, and for that they took Miyamoto's best, Mario and The Legend of Zelda. With Hotel Mairo, and 3 Legend Of Zelda Games you might think it sold great, well not it did not sell well and all of the games were not the best games either.

That is it for know thank you for reading!

By: Matthew Schreiner Jr

References

Al-Heeti, A. (2020, March 6). Nintendo PlayStation prototype sells for $360K. CNET. https://www.cnet.com/news/nintendo-playstation-prototype-sells-for-360k/

Ben Heck/element14. (2016, July 15). Ben Heck's Nintendo-Playstation Prototype Pt 1 Teardown. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ug-CyGXMabg

Ben Heck/element14. (2016, July 22). Ben Heck's Nintendo-Playstation Prototype Part 2 Repair. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qh91IO9cV48

Caruso, N. (2015, February 12). Nintendo's 3 Biggest Mistakes - Gaming Historian. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iW_MEKWTguA

PlayStation. (2007, September 22). Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Retrieved February 16, 2021, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation#Origins

Super NES CD-ROM. (2012, February 11). Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Retrieved February 16, 2021, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_NES_CD-ROM