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

IIRC (i wrote an EXTENSIVE article about it it took me ages of reaserch and reading, and was on the old assembler wiki) Nintendo had 2 agreements pending at the same time. They worked a deal with Sony but had a preceding one that stated they would partner with Philips if they were to release a CD Add-on...

Adding to that Sony would get a big slice of profits...

 

That doesn't really seem too different from the Twin Famicom, though - that was made by Sharp, but could play Famicom carts and discs.

 

Good point. There was also this odd portable DVD player by Visteon that played GBA carts, but I think there were so few of those made (or at least sold) it hardly counts. So maybe it's more the fact that the Sony/Phillips deal would have meant that S/P-licensed games would've found their way on 100%-Nintendo-made consoles...

 

A similar thing happened with the Saturn. Sega had an agreement with Victor (who made the CD drives) and Hitachi (who made the CPU) that the companies would be allowed to manufacture and sell their own versions of the Saturn, called the Victor V-Saturn and the Hitachi Hi-Saturn. A similar thing also happened with Sega and Victor with the Victor Wondermega.

 

Don't forget Aiwa and the Mega CD. The funny thing is that Aiwa is basically Sony. It was Sony' company to sell cheaper electronic goods.

Then there's Pioneer with their Mega Drive / Mega CD and PC Engine Laser Disc Player. And finally the Colombia Saturn compatible Karaoke system. The world of cross production is mad.

 

That one always made more sense to me, though - Hitachi and JVC were supplying key components of the system, but Sharp don't seem to have had anything much to do with either the Famicom or the Disc System - all the silicon was from Ricoh, the drive assembly was Mitsumi - my FDS RAM adapter had a Sharp RAM chip in it, but that's a commodity component (and the big custom chip was, as usual with the Famicom, a Ricoh part).

 

Or the Panasonic Q

 

The difference with most of those (the only one I can think of would be Samsung making Saturns in Korea) is that in this case, Sony would get the rights to licence their own games. Sharp, Victor, JVC, et cetera just got to make a console, they didn't get to sell rights to make a game for it, that stayed with Nintendo/Sega (depending on the system obviously).

The closest analogy I could think of would be the Sears Tele-games Atari 2600s. Most, if not all, games sold at Sears were for the "Tele-Games Video Arcade", which was a rebranded Atari 2600, and the games, accessories, etc worked on both, because I'm relatively certain the boards were identical.

 

I wonder why they couldn't simply change the terms of the deal rather than just abandon it completely.