StarDoor said:
Would it have been as early as the fifth generation without Nintendo, though? The commonly told history of PlayStation says that the executives at Sony had no interest in gaming in the late 80s and early 90s, and they only agreed to the Play Station deal because of Ken Kutaragi's work on the SNES sound chip. When that fell through, they continued in order to spite Nintendo. In some alternate universe without Nintendo, could a console not developed under the circumstances that we know really be called "PlayStation"? It would have a different controller, since they ran with the SNES design. It would have different games, since Nintendo's groundbreaking software basically led the industry in the 3rd and 4th generations. It would have a different identity and most likely a different name. |
Maybe it wouldn't have been as early as that. Hard to say what might or might not have happened.
Don't know about ground breaking software in the 3rd or 4th gens from Nintendo. The ones that I care about from those gens are from Squaresoft and Sega.
I'd say Sega influenced Sony more than Nintendo. But yeah, if the PS wasn't created, the industry would have been very different - most likely dead.
