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Recently, Sony’s Shuhei Yoshida shared some early memories of what would become the PlayStation. The president of SIE Worldwide Studios has been working for the company since the 1980s, meaning he was around for the launch of the original PlayStation console. And in honor of the PS1’s 30th anniversary in Europe, he shared some memories of the console’s origins in an interview with Game Industry Biz. And Sony’s first steps toward creating the PlayStation are pretty surprising.
The PS1 Began as a SNES Add-On, But Nintendo Scrapped the Project
My family had a SNES when I was very young, but my formative gaming years were split between the N64 and PS2. To me, they felt like such fundamentally different gaming systems, with very different styles of games. The N64 was for Mario Kart and Super Smash Bros, while the PS2 was home to RPGs like Kingdom Hearts and Final Fantasy 10. So, it’s pretty interesting to learn that the PS1 was born from a scrapped Nintendo add-on.
In his conversation with Game Industry Biz, Yoshida notes that the PlayStation started as a prototype CD-ROM add-on to Nintendo’s SNES. And that project, though ultimately scrapped, got further along than you think. There were apparently multiple working units produced, with plans to go into manufacturing for the system and even a few games. Though it would go on to inform the PS1, the project was built using Nintendo tech. In some ways, Yoshida said, that made this early prototype “very limited compared to the actual PlayStation.”
