"Nintendo created their big competition": Shuhei Yoshida says Super NES ditching PlayStation at the last minute was "almost helpful"

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"Otherwise the Sony team would have been stuck as part of a Nintendo system"

Promotional art for Final Fantasy 7
(Image credit: Square Enix)

In the early '90s, Nintendo and Sony collaborated on a console featuring Super NES hardware combined with a Sony-designed CD-ROM drive. Informally known as the Nintendo PlayStation, it would become an infamous bit of gaming lore, with Nintendo ditching the collaboration at the last minute to instead partner with Philips.

The partnership between Nintendo and Philips would ultimately result in a handful of terrible games for the doomed CD-i platform featuring characters like Mario and Zelda. Sony, meanwhile, would take the idea for PlayStation and turn it into an all-new console, cementing itself as a central pillar of the games industry in the process.

"It was almost helpful that Nintendo cancelled the project – otherwise the Sony team would have been stuck as part of a Nintendo system," former PlayStation boss Shuhei Yoshida tells GamesIndustry.biz (via Time Extension).

Nintendo's eventual entry into 3D gaming with the N64 would give us games like Super Mario 64 and The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time – all-time classics whose influence on the medium is still felt today. The original PlayStation would still more than triple the N64 in sales, and set Sony on the path toward dominating the console space for generations to come. I think that probably does count as "almost helpful."

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Dustin Bailey
Dustin Bailey
Staff Writer

Dustin Bailey joined the GamesRadar team as a Staff Writer in May 2022, and is currently based in Missouri. He's been covering games (with occasional dalliances in the worlds of anime and pro wrestling) since 2015, first as a freelancer, then as a news writer at PCGamesN for nearly five years. His love for games was sparked somewhere between Metal Gear Solid 2 and Knights of the Old Republic, and these days you can usually find him splitting his entertainment time between retro gaming, the latest big action-adventure title, or a long haul in American Truck Simulator.

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