Sony Studios President Reacts To “Nintendo Playstation”
Last week a real prototype of one of the most significant would-be consoles in gaming history, the Nintendo Playstation, showed up on Reddit. Nintendo and Sony were once to work together to bring the Playstation to market, but after Nintendo broke the deal, Sony made the Playstation on their own. The current console market would be a lot different today if the events in this debacle were changed even slightly.
The website Engadget caught up with Shuhei Yoshida, the President of Sony Computer Entertainment’s Worldwide Studios, at an event in Hong Kong hyping Project Morpheus…and they couldn’t resist whipping out their smartphones and showing him pictures of the prototype, to get his take on it. He was working with Sony at the time, and he did remember that machine!
Yoshida joined the Sony corporation in 1986. The Nintendo Playstation project would take place five years later. “When I joined Ken Kutaragi’s team [in 1993], there was a system called ‘Play Station’ that had both Super Nintendo cartridge support and some disc game support. Actually, I played some games [on it] as well.”
Shuhei was asked whether the prototype found on Reddit was real or not. He replied that he knew the answer to that question, but “somehow, I think it’s more fun to keep it kind of a mystery.”
You can watch the short interview at Engadget.