The History of Sony PlayStation Content from the guide to life, the universe and everything

The History of Sony PlayStation

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Or How Nintendo's dream became Sony's opportunity.

The story of the PlayStation began back in 1991. Nintendo wanted to incorporate CD-ROM into their Super Nintendo Entertainment System (Super NES). After some talks, Sony agreed to create the PlayStation, which would connect to the Super NES and allow it to play games from a CD-ROM drive. But before the end of the summer, Nintendo and Sony parted ways, cancelling their deal. Nintendo decided to try out Philips' CD-I technology, and Sony was left with the PlayStation, which they decided to keep developing.

In 1992 Nintendo and Sony joined forces once again to create the PlayStation. However, due to a conflict of visions for the PlayStation, they parted ways yet again. Nintendo still wanted the PlayStation to work in combination with the Super NES, while Sony wanted the PlayStation to be a standalone video game system.

Sony was left with a CD-ROM video game add-on. They decided to make a complete video game system all by themselves; they had all the right hardware to make something, they had a framework for a system left behind from their dealings with Nintendo, so why not?

Finally, in 1994 the Sony PlayStation was released in Japan. It became an instant success, and a wide variety of games were available with it. While a newcomer to the gaming industry, Sony was, and still is, a consumer electronics giant. They utilized their budget to back the PlayStation with advertising campaigns and quality software in time for their American launch in September 1995.

This is the truly amazing part of the PlayStation story: Sony, a newbie to the gaming industry totally uprooted two established big names: Nintendo and Sega.

To this day, the PlayStation is still on top of the competition, and continues to make more money for Sony than all of their other consumer electronics combined! To date, the PlayStation has sold more than 50 million units world-wide.


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