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

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).

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"Nintendo created their big competition," Yoshida continues. "But competition is always healthy. Now, Xbox, Nintendo, PlayStation seem to be going in very different directions, and I think that's great for the overall industry."

The exceedingly rare Nintendo PlayStation prototypes have made headlines in the past, with one unit selling at auction for over $300,000. Ken Kutaragi, who oversaw development of both the Nintendo prototype and the console that would eventually become PS1, "had multiple units of the final working prototypes," according to Yoshida.

"The system was already done and almost ready for manufacturing, and a few games were already finished," Yoshida says. "I played one game that was a space shooter, but still it was based on Super Nintendo tech, right? So it was limited."

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."

Blocky polygons and warping textures be darned, the best PS1 games are still well worth digging into today.