How Nintendo Created It's Own Worst Enemy

It is a common story element in comic books, television and movies for the hero and villian to start out as friends: Professor Xavier and Magneto, Smallville's Clark Kent and Lex Luthor, David Dunn and Elijah Price of M. Night Shyamalan's Unbreakable. An often overlooked real world example of this type of story is the creation of the Sony Playstation. A deal with Nintendo gone horribly wrong allowed Sony to break out and release their own successful home gaming console.

Before the Sega CD had been released, Nintendo was in the planning stages to have their own CD-rom based system released for the Super Nintendo. Sony was chosen to lead the development of this unit, and also had plans to make their own home entertainment system that was to be compatible with both SNES and SNES-CD games, among other types of media.

The deal went sour when the (then)president of Nintendo, Hiroshi Yamauchi reviewed the contract his company had made with Sony. Realizing that the contract in fact let Sony have total control over any games produced for the SNES-CD, Yamauchi immediately broke the deal. At the 1989 Consumer Electronics Show Nintendo announced they were producing a CD-rom console with the help of Philips (another deal that would fall through resulting in the creation of the CD-i) instead of Sony. Rather than simply filing away all of their designs for a video game console, Sony decided to continue development without Nintendo, and focused on pushing games to the next generation: The PlayStation.

Who knows what the gaming industry would be like today if this deal hadn't fallen through? Nintendo's focus on entertaining game play and Sony's mammoth hardware platform could have completely dominated the industry, leaving no room for others like Microsoft and the Xbox.