At the 1989 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Nintendo of America’s then-chairman Howard Lincoln took the stage to reveal some unexpected news: the company was partnering with European electronics firm Philips to make a CD-ROM-based games console. While the announcement took everyone in the audience by surprise, Sony engineer Ken Kutaragi was the most shocked of all. Just the night before, he and several Sony executives had been demonstrating a product developed in partnership with Nintendo. It was to be the world’s first hybrid console, featuring an SNES cartridge slot and a CD drive, with both formats available to game developers. That product, called “Play Station” (with a space), would never see the light of day.
Industry lore suggests that only 200 of the Play Station consoles were ever produced, and hardly anyone has actually seen one of the fabled consoles in the flesh. However, pictures of the legendary original Play Station surfaced on reddit yesterday, showing the hybrid console in all its grey and yellowed-plastic glory.
Absolutely glorious. I could look at the pictures for hours.
Nintendo refused the license to Sony for the SNES-CD since they were getting a raw deal, where Nintendo would not get an Iota of game licenses revenue of the system, which instead would go to Sony. So they pulled the plug on the whole project.
Probably one of the biggest corporate mis-steps in recent history, but not giving Sony the shaft might not have prevented Nintendo being de-throned if they had still gone with a cartridge for the N64, rather than CD.
Sega would’ve still released a CD-based Saturn, and a lot of triple-A titles would’ve ended up there, taking advantage of the much larger amount of space CD afforded.
The Saturn had some problems of it’s own (not insurmountable though) The long load times due to optical media and the very complicated development model made sure that Saturn had a very limited timespan in the market. Most of those grievances was solved with the dreamcast, but it was probably “too little too late”, and microsoft backed out to make their own system after the PS2 was released. If the dreamcast have had a better GPU and larger memory banks (so it could compete fairly with the PS2) it is unlikely that microsoft would have backed out, and thusly the world would perhaps never have seen the Xbox.
Saturn still had awesome games, though, and some equally awesome first-party titles. Sales of the Saturn and the Playstation were neck-and-neck, until Square announced FF7 as a Playstation-only title.
Sure, the Saturn was poorly marketed in the US, and that didn’t help, but it really was the lack of Final Fantasy that did it in.
Edited 2015-07-03 19:53 UTC
The GPU in the Dreamcast was far more powerful than the GPU in the PS2, if just a tad slower. For example, bump mapping was easily done on the DC, where it took Sony almost a year to figure out how to simulate bump mapping using VPU1. The DC also had far more vram, 8MB to the 2MB in the PS2. The DC also had hardware texture decompression. The PS2 needed to use VPU1 to decompress textures to stream to the GS. As to speed, the PS2 was maybe 25% to 50% faster at pushing polys in real games – ignore claimed poly speeds for any console as they reflect conditions only rarely found in games.
The audio was about the same on the two, with the DC having 64 channel to the 48 in the PS2, but the PS2 had a faster sound processor. The AICA was a slow ARM processor, while the PS2 used the MIPS 3000 that was the main CPU for PS1 games.
The three areas the PS2 was better in were the system ram (16MB on the DC and 32MB on the PS2), processor power (~200MHz SH4 on the DC vs the ~300MHz MIPS5900 on the PS2), and video decoding support (no built in hardware for decoding video on the DC vs MPEG2 hardware decoding support on the PS2).
That’s for the numbers, but what about the fun of games ? Have you ever team played Pen Pen TriIcelon on the Dreamcast ? As someone said above you, that’s the exclusive availability of ONE game that changed the history, not because it was technically superior on one platform than another.
If Tetris had been a GB exclusive, I’m sure we would still play in BW.
My comment was mostly refuting the statement the parent made that a better GPU was what the DC needed to compete with the PS2 when it was in actuality the one area it was already mostly better. The reality of video games is that hardware has very little to do with who “wins” a particular generation – it’s the games themselves as well as third party support. Whichever console manages to get the most fun games and the widest support normally wins. The PS1 won its generation because Sony did everything needed to bring in third parties, and to make sure every popular game got a GOOD PS1 port. The Dreamcast didn’t win its generation mainly because Sega destroyed their third party support. They pissed off devs bad enough that they used any excuse to drop DC from the list of systems to port to. If Sega had given the DC 32MB of system ram and a better CPU, it would have still failed given Sega acting the same to devs/distributors.
Also note that “winning” a generation means very little. Too many people have the opinion that there is one winner, and everyone else is a loser. As long as a video game maker doesn’t give up, they haven’t lost even if they didn’t win. The winner of one generation may be the next generation’s big loser (-cough- Wii U -cough-). With consoles moving to basically commodity PC hardware, hardware becomes even less of a factor in who “wins” the current gen.
Edited 2015-07-04 16:59 UTC
No, the PS2 had claimed PS1 total backward compatibility *AND* pretty good DVD playback at the time (the PS3 reiterated with supposed PS2 backward compatibility and BR playback)
The DC provided me with ours of fun but lacked this :
– EA games, because the US boss got a grip with some executives at Sega
– DVD playback (remember how CD and DVD were a Philips-Sony-Matsushita stuff back then)
– Hardware T&L + hyped ’emotion engine’ in the PS2
What the DC had instead :
– Impressive modular controller with optional VMU
– Built in modem (33k eu, 56k us), optional LAN (10M or 100M)
– High density discs (GD roms up to 1GB)
– Up to 4 players (not 6 billions, like the ad said) a-la N64 then GC
People still had to build their game collection from scratch. And while there was pretty awesome games (Skies of Arcadia, Sonic, Wetrix, Nomad Soul, Ecco, Jet Set Radio) it wasn’t just enough to beat the hype Sony pushed with an impressive marketing campaign.
Don’t forget that Sega released the Dreamcast from the tip of the lips, as Atari done 5 years before with the Falcon030, because both of them were nearly broke.
Compare the two : Atari made a trillion ST computers version (ST, STf, STe, Mega, thing and stuff) and Sega made several add-ons around the Megadrive (eu) aka Genesis (us only due to name licensing with a hard drive manufacturer)
Meanwhile the competition strengthened. Both Atari and Sega wasted resources into stupid prototypes that had not even a chance in the real world. Both companies had tried the color portable gaming system but had the same drawbacks, mostly ruining batteries in a snap of fingers.
Atari tried the 64 bits way with the Jaguar with only a 2MB cartridge to feed the 26 MHz beast, while Sega tried more things inbetween the Genesis and the Saturn. Sega CD, 32X and so on, all a rather waste or resources.
When the Saturn came out, it mostly had the same plague than the Atari Jaguar : one of the most horrible dev environment. Atari provided mock up of compilers and linkers, a paper thin documentation and needed a stock pile of various components to just produce something usable (they not even dared to provide a file system, even less in the Jag CD) the Saturn featured a dual core SH-2 system people had trouble mastering. While the system was capable (remember Nights ?) power is nothing without control.
The DC almost corrected every issue, the Japan based Katana project (SH-4 plus PowerVR GPU) won over the US counterpart (3DFX based, one reason of the grip the EA boss had against the DC) but they indeed lacked some features. The 16 MB main memory (32 in the Naomi game system) was a lesser issue because it just requested to shrink the texture resolution.
In the end, the consumer chose the most promising path, not the most coherent and future proof. Remember how many bought a PS3 for the Linux capability only to get it removed unilaterally by Sony two years later.
Sega was truly innovative and had its own development studio which provided the company with some exclusive franchises many loved. But now companies are no more driven by dreamers and developers, but stock holders and marketing people having an eye on their share.
Now DLC and micro payments rules more than the fun we once had in the 90′ and beginning of 2000′.
Sony’s really good at PR, making stuff seem more than it is. The “Emotion Engine” was just a MIPS 5900 with some MMX style instructions added on, plus two vector units. VU0 was not as powerful and was meant to be used by the CPU for helping with math-intensive operations, like physics calculations. VU1 was slightly more powerful, having more local memory and a couple DMA channels, and was meant for doing geometry and lighting. No, the PS2 didn’t have “hardware” T&L, it had a vector unit that would help do T&L in parallel to the CPU. Note how it’s part of the CPU instead of the GPU like hardware T&L came to be.
That said, that was better than the DC processor. The SH4 was a plain 32-bit SuperH with built in FPU. The model the DC used also had store queues to help with faster transfers, and paired FPU instructions that could help with things like physics or 3D transforms. It wasn’t nearly as good as the VUs in the PS2, and was one of the primary reasons the PS2 had better polygon throughput – the VUs could do geometry and lighting faster than the CPU in the DC.
The DVD support in the PS2 was a great feature… it was the main reason a lot of people (including myself) got one. The DC was a few years too early for DVD support. Perhaps if it had done well, Sega would have made an update with a DVD. Sega had barely released the ethernet adaptor before dropping out of the console race. That made those adapters damned expensive. Seriously, my DC BBA cost more than EVERYTHING ELSE I got DC-related put together. I was lucky to even get one, as rare as they are. Right at the time the PS2 came out, an updated DC with DVD and BBA standard would have kept Sega competitive, but they didn’t have the money by that time.
Hence this is now history. QED.
Yep, but very interesting history. Especially when someone can produce a prototype like the one in the article. Just incredible!
Anywho, as an old-school programmer, I get more enjoyment from programming on my old consoles than playing most of the games. Mild arthritis makes some of the tight jumps impossible, but I can still type just fine.
Just wanted to add, by 1998, PCs were running around 200-400 MHz at best, 3DNow and AGP 2 were just introduced. In that regard, the DC specs were pretty good for the day, considering it was a gaming console. And was also VGA capable (640×480).
Yeah, sure, had it built in broadband and DVD, things would have evolved differently.
Really? N64 and GC were flops yes… but thanks to these failures Nintendo re-invented itself and created the 2 most successful products in its history: NDS and Wii.
People usually forget that NDS is the most successful console ever created… and the Wii is not so far from there.
I think Sony competition was good for Nintendo in the long term.
Edited 2015-07-03 22:56 UTC
I was of course referring to their position in the home console, and not their continued unrivaled success in the portable market.
And, the GC was hardly a flop – it sold nearly as much as the Xbox (22 million vs 24 million), with each unit sold at a profit.
I think you are comparing apples and oranges by adding portable videogames. NDS was just a followup from Gameboy and GBA success, they only didn’t used the same name because of the VirtualBoy fiasco. Nintendo never had real competition in this area until smartphones, the only one to get a bit close to it was PSP that sold just a bit more than half of NDS total sales.
And by the way, NDS is not the most successful console ever, the throne belongs to the PS2:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_million-selling_game_consoles
Edited 2015-07-04 14:51 UTC
That list is old, NDS is the most successful console.
Do you have an updated list?
NDS is not being sold anymore, being succeded by the 3DS. Can’t count both altogether, otherwise you could also add PS3 to PS2
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xQbsbHy5WR0
But I guess this was an impressive 5 years before the CDX.
beautiful machine congrats!