Ultimately, it was really Nintendo that was responsible for the Sony PlayStation being created. Back in the 16-bit era, when the Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis were the dominant systems, Sega created a CD add-on peripheral pretty early in the life of the Genesis. Nintendo threatened their own CD add-on but it never saw the light of day. Nintendo partnered with Sony and Phillips at different times to develop this CD add-on but I guess they were never happy the results because the idea was ultimately shelved. Sony, a little upset at having put significant work into a system that wasn't going to get released, decided to go it alone and release their own standalone system. That would be the Sony PlayStation.
Sony had legitimate reasons to be upset. They announced the PlayStation at the June 1991 CES. The following day, Nintendo announced its partnership with Phillips. On the other hand, Nintendo was upset by Sony's attempt at wrangling software licensing away from Nintendo by using a special CD-ROM format that was exclusively owned by Sony. Prototypes continued to be developed and Nintendo and Sony tried to work out their differences through 1992 when Nintendo and Sony reached a deal in which Sony could release SNES compatible hardware. However, the following year, Sony dropped development of the Super Nintendo CD-ROM and devoted its efforts to its own standalone PlayStation.
At the time, I regularly bought issues of Electronic Gaming Monthly and it seemed like every couple of months they had some new news item or preview of the latest iteration of this supposed CD-ROM add-on. One issue went so far as to publish the "final" specs. I had a Super Nintendo and was very interested in this magical super gaming device that was supposed to cost less than $200 and add additional superpowers to the Super Nintendo.
In June 1992, EGM offered a "First Look" at the new Super Nintendo CD-ROM with schematic. In included impressive features such as a 21 MHz "SCCP" co-processor and a total of 8 Megabits of additional RAM. That's an addition 1 Megabyte which was pretty impressive for the time. Best of all, this wonder machine was supposed to clock in at under $200.
In the November 1992 issue of EGM, there was a news blurb about how Nintendo was abandoning their current design in favor of a new CD-ROM add-on that would have a 32-bit co-processor and that it could be in production as early as August 1993.
Finally, in the March 1993 issue of EGM, what were supposedly the "production" specs of the CD-ROM add-on were published. Specs included the following:
- Main Memory
- D-RAM: 8 Mbits
- PS-RAM: 1 Mbit
- Supplemental Memory
- D-RAM: 4 Mbits
- System ROM: 2 Mbits
- Co-Processor (SCCP)
- Type: 32-Bit RISC
- Clock Speed: 21.477 MHz
- Cache: 8 Kbit
- CD-ROM Decoder (HANDS)
- Type: 65C02
- Clock Speed: 4.295 MHz
- CD-ROM Drive
- Standard Access Time: 0.7 Sec.
- Max. Access Time: 1.4 Sec.
- Data Output Speed (Norm): 150 KBytes/sec
- Data Output Speed (2x): 300 KBytes/sec
These specs look quite similar to what had been published months before but with some more detail. But as we all know, this never saw the light of day.
Unfortunately, stories of the upcoming SNES CD-ROM add-on faded away in favor of a new ultra 64-bit system that would become the Nintendo 64. Ironically, the next system I owned after the SNES was the PlayStation. Nintendo really shot themselves in the foot by creating a competitor that would come close to crushing them. Or maybe it was all part of their plan to get rid of Sega as a hardware manufacturer.
There were a number of prototypes developed of this Super NES/CD-ROM combo and supposedly there were up to 200-300 working models at one point. Most were destroyed and as far as the world knows today, there is only one working model (see the first photo). It was in a box of junk owned by the former CEO of Sony and it sold at auction about a year ago for $360,000.
Had the SNES CD-ROM been released, The Secret of Mana would have been one of the launch titles. Instead, it was cut down so that it could fit on a cartridge. It was still an excellent game so we can only imagine how much better it might have been.
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One of my favorite games of all time but I wonder if it had the mass appeal back then. I don't think it was readily recognizable at the time. Who knows. There are other stories of companies accidentally creating a competitor that nearly squashed them. I want to say that Nintendo offered to sell out to Atari (this might not be true) but Atari was so arrogant by their market dominance at the time that they turned down the offer. Kind of like the mistake that Yahoo made when they passed on acquiring google for some crazy low price like $25 million.
I don't know if you ever actually played and Sega CD games, but for the most part they absolutely sucked.
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I think for the launch they would have wanted a launch title from as many major genres as possible. Arcade, sports, role playing, etc. Secret of Mana was well enough known among those that like that sort of game and it was the number 2 selling game behind Mortal Kombat in October 1993 in North America (according to Wikipedia). It was also huge in Japan with the initial shipment selling out. I think it was big enough to have been a system seller and it was definitely the sort of game that could have benefited by being on CD (much was cut from it for the cartridge release supposedly).
Yes, as i recall Nintendo offered the NES to Atari to market in the U.S. as an Atari system. However, Atari strung them along and released the Atari 7800 instead. That decision itself would not have necessarily been bad if Atari was not so stupid in their game development strategy (develop games as cheaply as possible without regards to quality). Remember, just a couple years before the NES, Atari WAS the Google of gaming. An even bigger issue was that Nintendo outsmarted Atari with the way they handled third party licensees. They were very strict locking in such developers to be exclusive to Nintendo. Arguably this was anti-competitive and illegal but it worked. So yeah, in retrospect turning down Nintendo was incredibly stupid. But had Atari been smarter in developing, marketing and attracting 3rd party developers it might not have been an issue. There was nothing really wrong with the Atari 7800 hardware. It's just that the vast majority of the software (what little there was) sucked.
Yep, Sega CD games pretty much sucked too, at least most of them. But it's because they seemed to focus on the wrong things. Crappy FMV, shovelware, and games that could have been done just as easily on cartridge. On the other hand, the CD format was excellent for creating huge RPG environments (with cuts-scenes and a cd quality soundtrack), standard sorts of side-scrolling adventure games with many more levels, etc. It's just that too few games released actually did this. It wasn't because of any technical limitations with their CD add-on though.
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