| happydolphin said: No, it's Sony who "backstabbed" Nintendo by trying to slease in complete rights control on all the games on their joint platform. Wikipedia: The product, dubbed the "Play Station" was to be announced at the May 1991 Consumer Electronics Show (CES). However, when Nintendo's Hiroshi Yamauchi read the original 1988 contract between Sony and Nintendo, he realized that the earlier agreement essentially handed Sony complete control over any and all titles written on the SNES CD-ROM format. Yamauchi decided that the contract was totally unacceptable and he secretly canceled all plans for the joint Nintendo-Sony SNES CD attachment. Instead of announcing a partnership between Sony and Nintendo, at 9 am the day of the CES, Nintendo chairman Howard Lincoln stepped onto the stage and revealed that Nintendo was now allied with Philips, and Nintendo was planning on abandoning all the previous work Nintendo and Sony had accomplished. Lincoln and Minoru Arakawa had, unbeknownst to Sony, flown to Philips headquarters in Europe and formed an alliance of a decidedly different nature—one that would give Nintendo total control over its licenses on Philips machines. And the funniest bit is that Nintendo would have had a CD-ROM enabled system had this not happened. It left such a sour taste in Yamauchi's mouth that he decided to reject the idea altogether. We know how that turned out... (oh cartriges |
)So, wait, Nintendo didn't read the contract they agreed to follow? They didn't realize what it said until years later? Then, instead of going to Sony and attempting to work out a new deal, they secretly canceled everything, obviously with the intent to fuck Sony over, and made a deal with someone else, which they revealed to Sony with a surprise announcement?
And people act like Nintendo was some kind of innocent victim in all of that? Holy cats.
It certainly sounds like they got what they deserved out of the situation. That was mostly a FUBAR of their own making. If they didn't agree with what Sony wanted then they should have said so from the start.
Actually, you know, reading that over, it sounds like bullcrap. How the hell do you just suddenly realize what a contract says years down the line? How does a large corporation not have legal experts examine every major agreement? Something is really fishy with this explaination.
