A former PlayStation employee has shared new insights about the canceled console project between Sony and Nintendo during an interview published on February 4, 2025. The collaboration, which began in the late 1980s, was intended to create the SNES CD, a CD-ROM add-on for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System. However, the partnership fell apart in 1992 after Nintendo unexpectedly announced a deal with Philips, leaving Sony to repurpose its work into what would become the first PlayStation.The former employee revealed that internal tensions arose because of disagreements over licensing and revenue sharing. According to them, Nintendo's leadership was concerned that
IIRC, Sony’s leadership wasn’t interested in their own game console until their partnership with Nintendo was unceremoniously dissolved without prior warning when Nintendo announced on stage that they were partnering with Phillips for a CD addon to the SNES.
That “betrayal” is what spurned Sony to go it alone with the hardware they had already developed as a starting point. Thus PlayStation was born.