foxtail said:
I think if there was no Playstation and no Sony/Nintendo partnership in its inception, that a Nintendo CD system would exist today.
Nintendo was planning on having a CD based system after the SNES and saw the future advantages of CD technology.
There were 3 major players when it came to optical disc based drives back then, i.e. Philips, Sony and Panasonic. If Sony was out of the picture and Nintendo needed a partner, they would likely be choosing between Philips and Panasonic.  In the end Nintendo did partner with Panasonic to produce its disc drives and proprietary discs for the Gamecube, Wii and Wii U.
The final design of Playstation controller was also born from SNES design, looking at Sony's initial controller designs they were way different.
If Nintendo didn't feel the need to differentiate itself from the Playstation controller, its own cotroller would've been an evolution of the SNES controller.  Instead Nintendo came up with controller that was radically different from SNES design, especially in how you held it and how spread out it was.
Overall if there was no Playstation, Nintendo's natural trajectory and evolution would be much different, but history is not what was - it's what is.
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Great post.
I think without Sony, Nintendo would have found another partner for a CD based console and released it. SEGA would have fared much better with the Saturn, and the industry would have been fine. Gaming became more "mainstream" simply by natural progression of life. Old school gamers in the 70's, 80's, early 90's get old and have kids. You now have more gamers.
Feature or tech wise, I can't think of anything Sony did that no one else would have done. Others did disc based gaming. Others already had done analog. Others had already done online gaming. Bluray or another HD media was a natural progression.
The industry would look different without Sony. LOL @ the idea that it would be in a "crisis".
