When it comes to the videogame industry, Nintendo might be the most interesting company to study. They have had such a wildly successful run of things that continues to this very day, and they’ve managed their history run due to all sorts of zigs and zags that no one ever saw coming. Sometimes Nintendo was so unpredictable that they even blindsided potential partners, and that very much applies to Sony.
There are a handful of moments in Nintendo history where things went incredibly wrong for the company…at least at first. When you look back at projects like the Virtual Boy and Wii U, you might first think of them as failures, but without those missteps we wouldn’t have seen successes like the 3DS and Switch. That same line of thinking could be applied to the potential partnership between Sony and Nintendo back on the SNES, but perhaps on a scale we haven’t seen since.
Diehard Nintendo fans know that Sony and Nintendo almost worked together for a CD-ROM add-on for the SNES that would have been called the SNES PlayStation. In the 11th hour Nintendo got cold feet and pivoted to a deal with Phillips, which could certainly be considered the Big N’s greatest fumble. Not partnering with Sony for the SNES add-on caused Sony to release the PlayStation, which has becoming one of the game industry’s biggest juggernauts.
It’s easy to look back on Nintendo’s cold shoulder to Sony as a huge mistake unlike many other in the industry, but it’s that pivot that also pushed Nintendo into different areas of gaming. Arguably, some would say Nintendo’s grandest achievements may have been spurred on by moving away from Sony. Nevertheless, whether you see the move as a good or bad one, there’s no denying it was hugely influential on the industry as a whole.
In a new interview from Venturebeat, former PlayStation executive Shuhei Yoshida talked a bit about the era where Sony moved on from the lapsed Nintendo deal to build and release the PlayStation on their own. A big part of making that platform a success was landing big-name software support, and Sony did just that when they got Square Enix (Squaresoft at the time) on board.
According to Yoshida, Squaresoft tried to convince Nintendo that CDs were the way to go with the N64, but the requests fell on deaf ears. Perhaps if Nintendo made that move, they would have never seen Squaresoft take Final Fantasy to PlayStation, but hindsight is 20/20. You can see Yoshida’s full comments on the matter below.
I became the lead account manager for the Japanese publishers and developers. Our goal was to get all the major games in Japan to come to the PlayStation. At the time there were two big teams working with Nintendo, Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest. For the Japanese audience, those were the most popular games. When a new one came out you had long lines of customers waiting to buy them. It made the national news when a new Dragon Quest came out. There was controversy over kids calling out sick from school to stay home and play games.
Of course, initially they weren’t interested. They were close to Nintendo. But Hironobu Sakaguchi, the creator of Final Fantasy, loved the potential of CDs. His dream was to create a movie-like Final Fantasy game. He was disappointed when he learned that the Nintendo 64 still used cartridges. His movies couldn’t fit there. Squaresoft tried to convince Nintendo to change that plan, but they wouldn’t. They didn’t believe in CD-ROM at all. That’s why they licensed the Super Nintendo add-on project to Sony in the first place, because they believed CD-ROM was just too slow to ever make for a good game system.
[Former PlayStation executive Shuhei Yoshida]
