Phillips CD-i and Phillips Snes-CD, Questions about the deal and the outcome.

I have been listening to the book "Console War". They talk a bit about Nintendo walking away from the PlayStation deal, and then working with Phillips. But they never explain by Phillips or Nintendo walked away from CD-i and Snes-CD deal. I know the fallout for the deal was the horrible Mario and Zelda games. Why did Nintendo walk away? And was the CD-i a stand alone Snes-CD? If so that is kinda what the games would have looked like minis that Nintendo magic.

 

I guess things just didn't work out. It's crazy how many deal there were, turning back on each other and stuff. Everyone really got screwed there. Imagine if the PS1 didn't exist today. I wonder if Xbox would be the only one around.

 

Why would Xbox be the only one around? You think disc based media would never of sold or something? PCs used CD-ROM.

I believe the deal went out, because SNES was soon to be replaced, or Nintendo probably already had the N64 in development.

 

A big part of it came down to licensing. Essentially, Nintendo wouldn't get any of the licensing costs on Sony Play Station or SNES CD titles. Sony would. Which is an issue. Philips offered a better deal to Nintendo. By the time Sony and Nintendo worked out most of their issues, it was too late.

 

Also can't forget the amazing success of CD-ROM add-ons for the other machines ...

 

Licensing and money are both large parts of it, as well as who retains the rights to the games that came out on the system, which ties back into licensing. I'm sure Nintendo also wanted to do something stupid with a proprietary disc format too in an effort to control how many games were manufactured, which I'd imagine Sony balked at.

 

But there was no official release given for the deal to have fallen through right? All of them are purely speculation?

 

I don't believe there was ever a release, it just died quietly (as a lot of things in the gaming industry do after they're announced). All the info I can find is that Nintendo got wet feet after the Sega/Mega-CD flopped.

I think what's crazy is what would have happened if the CDi was successful, on the backs of Nintendo games (let's just hypothetically assume the 4 that were released weren't terrible).

 

The CD-i was simply not built to be a gaming machine. It was originally envisioned to be a sort of home educational tool (like buying encyclopedias). It was severely underpowered for the purpose of running games, and the input controls were sluggish and clumsy. The team responsible for Zelda: Wand of Gamelon and Link: Faces of Evil had to jump through all sorts of technical hoops just to get the screens to scroll around.

 

No wonder Mario Takes America didn't get very far. The console could barely handle a simplistic side-scroller, let alone an ambitious title like that.

 

http://www.n-sider.com/contentview.php?contentid=231

Nintendo was privately incensed by the Sony Play Station deal they had signed, which as others said put licensing and hardware rights solely in Sony's pocket. Nintendo signed with Dutch company Philips, and eventually "broke" the Sony contract. This was a no-no in Japanese business, breaking a deal to side with a foreign firm to get a leg up on a domestic competitor. The deal was probably mainly to gain leverage over Sony. Eventually Sony, Philips and Nintendo agreed to joint develop a new 32-bit console using the same CD format. Nintendo would control game licensing and hardware, while Sony would control all TV/Movie disc rights. This project never made it to the prototype stage.

Nintendo canceled the Philips SNES CD project, for a few reasons. One was that the SEGA CD and TurboGrafx CD systems had largely failed. Two was that the SuperFX chip and others had shown that the SNES could live longer just with those enhancements. In the end, it was clear that both Nintendo and Sony were aiming for the next plateau, 32-bit, and all the infighting just pushed the projects well past their desired shelf-lives.

Console Wars largely stuck to the Sega/Sony dynamic, because the author couldn't get Nintendo folks to talk very much. Tom Kalinske of Sega did broker a deal shortly after the Winter CES Nintendo announcement that Philips was chosen, to collaborate with Sony. Unfortunately for SEGA, its Japanese executives and engineers had too much ego, and disabled the partnership whenever they could. The result was the massively successful PS1 after Sony went it alone, and the massive failure Saturn which Sega of Japan put to market.

At the end of the day, Ken Kuturagi played both Nintendo Japan and Sega Japan like a fiddle.

 

The Saturn wasn't a failure in Japan. It sold 6 million units, more than the N64 (Sony, having made the least stupid mistakes, sold a crapload everywhere). The Saturn's biggest problem was that SOA and SOJ had no communication between each other.

 

Who's fault was that? SOJ were dismissive and probably envious of SOA/SOE success in 16-bit. They were the ones who foolishly went ahead with the 32x, damaging the company's reputation. Same ones who had the bright idea of releasing the console 6 months early, which was a massive disaster. Had it not been for Kalinske/SOA, Yu Suzuki would have stopped making SEGA games years earlier. Kalinske knew the Playstation would go gangbusters, he was trying to delay that one generation while possibly knock down/out Nintendo. SOJ was led by dinosaurs who carried more about misplaced ego than winning.

 

Every time someone brings up the SNES CD-ROM, that old wound opens up again... Answering the question "why" has never gotten me any closer to closure. One of these days I'm going to start a Kickstarter campaign to finally build a working CD-ROM addon for the SNES. It would be absolutely pointless considering its capacity would be less than SD2SNES, it's capability wouldn't be much better than the MSU1 (or whatever the SD2SNES chip is) and there'd be like two groups in the world both willing and capable of making decent games for it. But damnit my adolescence will not let go of the desire to snap my SNES onto a similarly-styled platic box, open the disc tray and pop in something that has a logo with "Super Nintendo" and "CD" creatively combined on it, and play my extra megahertzes and better mode 7 and full motion video and 64:1 compression and CD-quality stereo sound game. The next kickstarter will be to add animated cutscenes into Secret of Mana and get sued into oblivion by the Squeenix dream crushing department.

 

Yes, surely Sony would never have anything to do with proprietary storage media....

 

Sorry I can't see what you're showing. Picture needs to be bigger.

 

This

Altho most parts I do know, please continue. I love this extra bit of company internal struggle. Do we know what Phillips ideas where?

 

I was worried that might be a problem for some people, but I didn't want to upset the page formatting by using a bigger image.

 

He was being sarcastic. 1500 pixels wide is a ridiculously large size for use on forums. If you take off the forum's auto resize, it's what.... at least 20 times larger than an actual card?

 

Take off the housing of that cart and you might just be able to read the data off the cart by visually inspecting each transistor individually, at that resolution :b Putting that aside, I think an UMD would've been a better example (what with them being optical media and all). And then there was also the MiniDisc. So you really can't say Sony wouldn't want to do anything with proprietary formats.

Btw, I just came across this:

What's most interesting (to me) is that it sounds like that in both constellations there would have been two devices (one SNES CD addon by Nintendo, one standalone by Phillips/Sony), both fully compatible with each other - i.e. there'd be a non-Nintendo console playing Nintendo (even first party!) games (apparently not limited to CDs, but also carts). This, I believe, would be hard to swallow for Nintendo even today.