Hacker News Reader

Comment by Tiktaalik | Hacker News Reader

Kind of a weird title. The SNES CD was the Playstation ancestor. The CD-i was a device made independently that Nintendo partnered with after they dumped Sony.

Spurned by Nintendo, Sony took their SNES CD tech and created the Playstation from it.

View on HN

Nintendo did more than just dump Sony, they humiliated them.

Originally, Sony was supposed to be Nintendo's partner for the CD-i machine. Nintendo went behind Sony's back and partnered with Phillips.

At the summer 1991 CES when Sony was expecting the CD-i machine and their partnership with Nintendo to be announced, Nintendo announced the product with Phillips as their partner.

I can't help but wonder how much animosity towards Nintendo contributed towards the development of the Playstation 1.

Supposedly that partnership lead to the only time, until recently, where Nintendo characters appeared outside of a Nintendo system.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CD-i_games_from_The_Legend_of_...

there were a few exceptions in the early days when they first had their own consoles https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Mario_Bros.#Ports

and of course before they had consoles: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donkey_Kong_(video_game)#Licen...

I remember thinking at the time that the PS1 controller was just like a Snes controller with extended hand grips. They just changed the out the colours / letters for shapes.

From the books I’ve read that humiliation is WHY Sony was willing to green light the PlayStation and get into games.

They created the enemy that dethroned them.

Well... PlayStation has CD-XA, which is kind of the other leg of the Sony/Philips/Nintendo triangle.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CD-ROM#XA

"It was intended as a bridge between CD-ROM and CD-i (Green Book) and was published by Sony and Philips in 1991."

I assume they meant it as ‘the first CD console, like the PlayStation was’.

I agree though, it’s misleading.

It only beat Sega CD to the market by less than two weeks. Which, to be fair, wasn't a standalone console, it needed to attach to a Genesis, however they did sell combined (CD plus Genesis) consoles.

The CDX. A great little console. Even worked fine with the 32X despite Sega’s claims to the contrary.

Even if it looked crazy in that configuration.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com