Though many gamers have our preferences, really playing all of the great new games out there usually means having multiple consoles. Nintendo, in particular, has a ton of exclusives that you simply can’t get anywhere else, leading many households to have a Switch alongside a PlayStation or Xbox console. But even if many of us have more than one gaming system, the console wars rage on. So it’s a bit surprising to learn that the original PlayStation once began as a Nintendo offshoot.
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Recently, Sony’s Shuhei Yoshida shared some early memories of what would become the PlayStation. The president of SIE Worldwide Studios has been working for the company since the 1980s, meaning he was around for the launch of the original PlayStation console. And in honor of the PS1’s 30th anniversary in Europe, he shared some memories of the console’s origins in an interview with Game Industry Biz. And Sony’s first steps toward creating the PlayStation are pretty surprising.
The PS1 Began as a SNES Add-On, But Nintendo Scrapped the Project
My family had a SNES when I was very young, but my formative gaming years were split between the N64 and PS2. To me, they felt like such fundamentally different gaming systems, with very different styles of games. The N64 was for Mario Kart and Super Smash Bros, while the PS2 was home to RPGs like Kingdom Hearts and Final Fantasy 10. So, it’s pretty interesting to learn that the PS1 was born from a scrapped Nintendo add-on.
In his conversation with Game Industry Biz, Yoshida notes that the PlayStation started as a prototype CD-ROM add-on to Nintendo’s SNES. And that project, though ultimately scrapped, got further along than you think. There were apparently multiple working units produced, with plans to go into manufacturing for the system and even a few games. Though it would go on to inform the PS1, the project was built using Nintendo tech. In some ways, Yoshida said, that made this early prototype “very limited compared to the actual PlayStation.”
But the PlayStation as an offshoot of the Nintendo wasn’t meant to be. Instead, Nintendo opted to go in a different direction. Rather than confirm its partnership with Sony, the company chose to ally itself with Philips instead. This spurred Sony to take that Nintendo add-on prototype and shape it into its very own PlayStation console, sparking the start of a rivalry that lingers to this day. The SNES CD-ROM add-on never came to fruition under Philips, either, in part due to licensing issues with Sony.
Those early Nintendo add-on prototypes from PlayStation still exist, though they’re quite rare. Yoshida himself still has one, and they have occasionally popped up on eBay as well. It would’ve been interesting to see the SNES with a PlayStation CD-ROM add-on, but ultimately, I think most gamers would agree that having both Nintendo and PlayStation doing their own things has led to more variety in the gaming world. Both Nintendo and PlayStation have put out some massively popular IPs in the years since their failed attempt at a partnership, and gaming just wouldn’t be the same if they’d stayed part of one big unit.
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image courtesy of 20th Century Studios
