Before the PlayStation, Sony worked with Nintendo on a CD-ROM drive for the Super Famicom. Nintendo decided to pull the plug on the device, and Sony itself entered the console business – a direct competitor and a strong force in the industry.
With that in mind, Ken Kutaragi, ‘The Father of PlayStation’, recently visited the bar of Katsuhiro Harada of Bandai Namco and took some time to think about the relationship between PlayStation and other companies – like Nintendo – during this era.
Kutaragi said he enjoyed working with Nintendo’s team and believed that the media at the time, along with ‘outside perspectives’, had mistaken these relationships. He explains how in the long run this idea of ’conflict’ between Sony, Nintendo and Sega could only help the industry grow. Here is the complete overview:
“Before PlayStation, I worked with Nintendo on Super Famicom, and I liked Mr. Uemura and his team a lot, I was with them regularly and got along with them. But from the outside, we were considered fighting. We did not fight at all. ‘
“I just asked such questions,” is [PlayStation’s] competitors Sega or Nintendo? “they asked me, but we would never have thought who the competitor was, because we were all co-workers. People outside do not think so … they do not know the truth …They brought our industry to life. ‘
While comments like these may not have been so compelling in the 1990s, Sony and Nintendo nowadays cover different parts of the video game industry. If you are curious to know more about Nintendo and Sony’s past, you can visit our feature on the SNES PlayStation.