The alliance could have resulted in a Nintendo console with a disc reader; but it did not bear fruit and each company went on its way.
The relationship between Sony and Nintendo in the 1990s is well known. What could have been a console of the great N with a disc reader ended up drifting in two separate paths from which names such as PlayStation and Nintendo 64 arose. The story is already written, but as much as the years go by they do not cease to be known. aspects of that association that never paid off. Phil Harrison, current vice president and general manager of Google, has talked about it.
In an encounter with IGN, the one who was once president of Sony Computer Entertainment has positively valued that this agreement did not bear fruit, which was something beneficial for the videogames sector. Not only did Sony win, which put on the market a platform capable of exceeding 100 million units sold across the planet, the winner of that generation, but because when giving rise to two such different systems it deepened on a creative level.
"Yes, almost certainly," he replies when asked about whether the abandoned project was more positive than negative. To which he adds: "But in reality it is more important than my career … I think, really, it was the best thing that has ever happened to the industry, because it stimulated great creativity and innovation at the level of developers and for publishers ; also economically ”.
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It continues to indicate that everything happened at a time of transition for the sector, where things were going well, but it was still in the process of becoming a business for the great masses. The decision to add a disc reader was expensive and risky, but now that they look back at it, they realize that they ended up saving a lot of money with respect to the cost of ordering thousands of cartridges in the distribution chain. “It was a very, very expensive business; a business to be part of became distasteful. ”
Harrison himself reported in the same interview the real reason that led to the delay of PlayStation 3 in the market, a component of only $ 0.05 for the Blu-ray reader.
