Advent Calendar 14: Nintendo's Crazy Ex

Greetings, and welcome to Advent Calendar 2022! This year we're being self-indulgent and rambling about video games.

As usual, the Advent Calendar is also a pledge drive. Subscribe to my writing Patreon here by TOMORROW for at least $5/mo and get an e-card for Ratmas; subscribe for $20/mo (and drop me a mailing address) and you'll get a real paper one!

I hope you're all having a happy winter holiday season. Let the nerd rambling commence!

Gather 'round, children, and let me tell you the story of How The Playstation Came To Be. Once upon a time, there was a Super Nintendo Entertainment System. The SNES was a shiny, shiny thing in 1991 (1990, as the Super Famicom, in Japan). A spiffy new 16-bit games console that played all the latest Mario and Castlevania and Metroid games, its main rival was the slightly older Sega Genesis (né Sega Megadrive, 1988 in Japan, 1989 in North America). The two coexisted for some time with only the usual sibling rivalry, where Sega pulled an attitude and claimed to do "what Nintendon't", and Nintendo pointedly ignored them while pointing at some plumbers from Brooklyn with an inexplicable hatred of turtles.

One day, Sega learned a new trick. The older Nintendo bro, the Famicom, had come up with an add-on device that let it play games off diskettes; the little Sega Megadrive thought about this and went, yes, but what if I used CDs instead? CDs were super cool, cutting-edge, space age tech at the time, which was not coincidentally also 1991. Compared with cartridges, CDs had an unimaginable amount space to fill, and since they were for music first, Sega threw in a nicer sound chip to sweeten the deal. Thus was born the Sega CD.

Nintendo looked at that and grudgingly admitted they had a point.

Obviously the thing to do was steal this concept, so Nintendo got to work on a CD add-on for the SNES. Neither company worked with CDs or audio tech themselves; Sega had partnered with JVC for the Sega CD. (JVC stands for Japan Victor Corporation, by the way, the Japanese subsidiary of RCA Victor, the people who used to use the painting of a terrier listening to a phonograph as their logo. The original painting was titled "His Master's Voice", which title eventually ended up, through a complicated series of divestitures and acquisitions, as the name of the HMV record stores in several Commonwealth countries.) Nintendo phoned up Sony, who had developed the original CD standards in conjunction with Philips Electronics. Together they started work on a prototype equivalent of the Sega CD, accurately if boringly titled the Super NES CD-ROM.

The unveiling at the Consumer Electronics Show was an event. Sony proudly unveiled the fruits of its labor, a combination SNES-cartridge/CD-ROM machine they called the "PlayStation". It received many oohs and ahs from the audience. The very next day, Nintendo revealed its half of the project, a CD-ROM add-on for the SNES, produced in partnership with... uh, Philips. Philips Electronics. You know, Sony's best friend.

To say Sony was angry was an understatement. They were livid. It just wasn't working out, Nintendo said. Sony kept asking for things -- licensing fees, rights, content control. Nintendo and Philips just had long term goals that were so much more compatible! Mainly because they made Nintendo more money. Surely Sony would understand. It was just better for business.

Fine, said Sony. We'll just make our own console! With blackjack! And hookers! I'm not actually kidding about that part, a lot of the early Playstation marketing centered around the fact that Sony would let you publish games including adult things like sex, violence, drugs, and naughty words, which were all still very much banned in Nintendo titles. This ultimately led to Sony landing the Grand Theft Auto console ports, and we all know how that turned out.

The SNES CD-ROM project eventually stuttered to a halt, and nothing of the sort ever came out, even in Japan. The backlash soured Nintendo on CDs so much that they refused to make the switch with everybody else for their next console generation, opting instead to use ROM cartridges in the Nintendo 64. This bout of sour grapes actually lost Nintendo several of their loyal publishers -- the Golden Age of JRPGs started on the Super Nintendo, but chafed at the space restrictions of the N64. The biggest, fattest rat to jump off that particular sinking ship was Squaresoft, who started developing for the N64 but ultimately opted to publish the smash hit Final Fantasy VII on Playstation, where the game could span three CDs.

Nintendo continued to drag its feet on disc technology through the DVD era, declining to include DVD-Video playback on its GameCube, Wii, and WiiU systems, even though all three use DVD drive mechanisms, and are physically capable of reading DVD discs (mini-DVD in a GameCube, without a case mod). Sony, in contrast, coughed up the licensing fees and advertised the shit out of the DVD player function of their Playstation 2. The PS2 didn't just wipe the floor with the Wii (and the Xbox), it became the best-selling video game console of all time.

The Nintendo/Sony PlayStation fell into the black hole of history. For almost a quarter century it was thought that none of the prototypes had survived, but in 2015 a single example was discovered in a bankruptcy auction of random stuff from a completely different company where a Sony CEO had once worked. The creaky, dusty, substantially-broken thing was presented to Benjamin Heckendorn, aka "Ben Heck", a passionate nerd who accidentally invented a career for himself about two decades ago by hacking apart an Atari 2600 and reassembling it into a handheld. 

He did a full teardown of the machine on The Ben Heck Show, a series he filmed for the content provider element14, and managed to get it working, in conjunction with a boot ROM mysteriously leaked to several prominent members of the retrogaming/emulation community. There is no known surviving software for the machine, but several people have verified that homebrew games will play.