It's a fairly little known fact that Nintendo was, at one point, working with Sony to develop a console. Back when CDs were all the rage, Nintendo was in the market to develop a CD add on with Sony, which was not affiliated with games at the time. It wasn't to be, unfortunately, and there was a falling out between the two companies. Sony then decided to take its prototype, removed the SNES parts, and marketed it as its own console. Thus, the Playstation was born.
Most thought that the SNES Playstation was never actually made, until a functioning unit showed up last year. While it may be true that no games were ever produced for the doomed hardware, it nonetheless did exist. Interestingly enough, there's been a new development around this recently, where the ROM containing some diagnostic tools for the console was dumped online. Granted, it's nothing terribly exciting, but it's an important and obscure part of gaming history that the public was previously not privy to. Check out the footage:
What do you think? Would you have bought a SNES Playstation? Where do you think either company would be today if this went into mass production? Share your thought in the comments below.
[source retrocollect.com, via youtube.com]
Comments 19
I wonder is this had become a thing, we might have gotten all of square great RPGs that appeared on the PS1.
Also, I'm sure Sony would have made the Play Station sooner or later even is this existed.
It'll be interesting to see what comes out of it all in the future. I'm sure at some point someone will create a working Bootable rom and individuals will start making homemade games, or even rehashing old snes games using cd data (chrono trigger comes to mind) from games released on other systems. Maybe at some point there will even be a Bootable working game disc...
thanks to the multiverse theory, i know that out there somewhere in the infinite realities of reality, there are nintendo playstations with a game library we can only dream of.
@Jamotello it's too bad we can't actually prove any of that.
Its time for someone to pull a Wu Tang and develop a game for one person. I'm curious what type of power the thing is packing. I'd love to see what some old school squaresoft guys could squeeze out of that thing.
@Kalmaro Being infinite, I'm fairly sure THERE IS an alternate universe where that proof, in fact, exist. 😄
But seriously, this multiverse theory - as well as all other unprovable theories - seems to interest people more than finding the solutions to OUR universe problems...
@andrea987 so true
@twistedbee This is perfect for those folks working with the MSU1 chip. Instead of trying to fit FMV and CD quality audio on that expensive chip, they can easily convert work on SNES Super Disk. Glad to know a rom exists of the diagnostics tools and the system has been emulated.
Super Disc, the "NO CD-ROM SYSTEM"
I guess it's the precursor to Super Hardcore, the NO THIRD PARTY SYSTEM
@Jamotello I wish you hadn't said that about the Multiverse theory,I've got things to do yet I've now got several tabs open reading about it.I'll be here for ages.Thing is I've read about it before,fascinating stuff!
I love the N64, but I always wonder what could have been if Nintendo just went with CD...
I was playing my N64 recently again and all Rare's titles still impress on a technical level. Their texture work alone puts all Nintendo's work, even on Gamecube and Wii to shame.
I wonder how would do on the market since the sega cd flopped, and then Philips cdi also crashed and burned (but they really didn't have any good software).
From time to time, Nintendo gets a little cocky and it ends up biting them in the ass. This was clearly one of those times.
@andywitmyer Proof or baloney?
@Leu10antFalcon Let's see... Have you ever heard of the Sony PlayStation?
Don't mean to be picky, but for what it's worth, Sony was involved in video games at the time. They were a third party publisher, known as 'Sony Imagesoft'.
Someone really should create a game for this. Not sure what I'd want to see... something in that transition time... Secret of Mana with cinematic movies streamed from the CD? And play remixed music off the CD? That's one of the known games that was being developed for SNES-CD. Could have been games in 1992 for other ideas...
I was very excited about the SNES CD at the time, and would have happily saved up my pocket money for one.
@andywitmyer Your answer is baloney. Sorry.
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