It's curious to examine the past of some companies, especially when we explore it through strange prototypes and projects that never saw the light of day. Today, no one doubts that Nintendo and Sony are direct competitors, but in a distant and mysterious time, they worked as partners. One of the projects born from that partnership was called the Play Station, and it combined a new optical format with the classic cartridge system of the Super Nintendo.
The SNES-CD and a Forgotten Partnership
Legend has it that in 1988, Nintendo and Sony began developing the SNES-CD format. As its name indicates, the goal of that format was to extend the capabilities of the Super Nintendo (Super Famicom in the Japanese version) through a proprietary optical drive. I imagine our veteran readers must have seen some image of the concept: the console connected on top of this special unit, considerably increasing its height.
The Play Station Appears at CES
Both Japanese giants worked side by side on the format for three years, and the first fruits were about to fall from the tree. However, problems soon appeared. Sony made an appearance at the 1991 CES and revealed the Play Station (note the space) to the public, a platform that combined the SNES-CD format with the traditional cartridge interface of the Super Famicom.
In simple terms, we are looking at the ancestor of the PlayStation we all know. The idea was very striking: owners of a Super Famicom could add the SNES-CD support through its dedicated module, while Sony would present an alternative with its Play Station. What happened? Nothing less than a massive licensing conflict. Thanks to a notable skill with legal resources, Sony managed to retain control (including profits) over the SNES-CD format and continue its development, a detail that the then president of Nintendo, Hiroshi Yamauchi, finally decided to oppose.
Just 24 hours after Sony had presented its Play Station at CES, Nintendo announced an agreement with the direct opponent of Sony, Philips, to create the optical module compatible with the Super Famicom. The key point: all software licenses and profits would remain under Nintendo's control, who in exchange would allow the arrival of some official games to Philips' CD-i, a format that would cost the European company nearly a billion dollars in losses, and its exit without glory from the video game market.
Prototypes and the End of an Era
Just a year later, Sony and Nintendo managed to smooth things over. Sony was allowed to develop hardware compatible with Super Famicom cartridges as long as Nintendo received the revenue from the games, but the magic was already broken. The photos you just saw belong to one of the 200 prototypes that Sony created of its Play Station, before completely abandoning the project and focusing on the revolutionary 32-bit PlayStation 1.
For its part, Nintendo saw that the idea of an optical module for the Super Famicom had worn thin, which led to its cancellation, and it would enter the fifth generation of consoles a year and a half later than the PS1 with its Nintendo 64, using cartridges. Regarding the Play Station unit itself, the Imgur user DanDiebold explains that a co-worker of his father had also worked for Nintendo, and the console was in a box with junk that was supposedly to be thrown away...
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