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Thursday, May 26, 2011

SUPER PLAY CORNER - DECEMBER 1992 / JANUARY 1993


Welcome to Super Play Corner. Let's see what was going on in the Super Play pages in December 1992...



Okay, so that's... entirely random...

 

(You'll have to click on these two pages to view them full-size)
This is an update on the Super NES CD ROM add-on that was planned for a long time, eventually scrapped and in the meantime singlehandedly created Nintendo's biggest ever rival... If you couldn't be bothered reading, here are a couple of quotes:

"The other big reason for the delay involves a serious amount of corporate politics. The original CD ROM development plan was a joint Sony/Nintendo effort - many people expected this to lead to the development of an industry standard. However, things soon went wrong. Sony's own plans with its Super Famicom/CD ROM hybrid, the Play Station, created a rift between the companies, until things reached a point where a new alliance was made with Philips to develop the unit instead...

But since then a lot has happened. On 1 October 1992 Nintendo announced a revised deal with Sony, taking the project back to them. The new system is now said to be fully compatible with the Play Station - this way Nintendo benefits from Sony's expertise in compact disc technology, while Sony gets the chance to unleash a video games machine with a huge potential market...

Don't hold your breath waiting for the CD ROM system. However, do expect it to be stunning when it eventually appears. The technology is there, the talent certainly is, and Super Scope aside, Nintendo has yet to release something that wasn't worth waiting for. Sega knows this more than anyone."

I find it fascinating to read news like this and imagine how the gaming world would be different if Nintendo had just released the CD ROM system. The entire PlayStation brand most likely wouldn't exist. (Well, not as we know it, anyway) Perhaps Sega would be leaders of the console market today. The Super CD (or whatever it would have been called) might have been a dismal failure like the Mega CD. Who knows?

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