Deja Vu but I think the PS1 dominated because of third parties. I already posted in this thread but I feel the need to illustrate my point. The defining games of the PS1, imo:

Final Fantasy VII (Square)
Resident Evil (Capcom)
Metal Gear Solid (Konami)
Tekken (Namco)
Tomb Raider (Eidos)
WipeOut (Prognosis)

I'm trying to think of more from different companies but off the top of my head, that's what I got. But I think we can agree that these are the games, right? I'm sure there's more from like EA or Acclaim or whatever.

My point is that THIRD PARTIES DID NOT ABANDON NINTENDO. All of these companies made at least one game for the N64 as well. The N64 just didn't have the ability to run decent versions of cinematic heavy, symphonic music filled games with its paltry memory.

On the surface, the answer seems to be no, but many of the PlayStation's killer apps abandoned the N64 due to the storage limitations and expensive development of the carts Nintendo went with.

PS1 came 3 years after the Sega CD. And one year before the Sega Saturn. 

Did I wake up in some sort of alternate reality where no one remembers or knows this shit?

I don't even get what your comment has got to do with what I was saying. I wasn't even talking about sega, just said that originally the Nintendo PlayStation (or at least one version of it) was supposed to be a CD add on for the SNES the same way the sega CD was an add on for the Mega Drive.

And yes, after Nintendo baked off their agreement with sony in 1990 sony considered taking their tech to sega instead, but ultimately decided to just make their own console.

None of this changes what I was originally saying, Nintendo is responsible for the Playstation existing as it is today.

True I remember reading a magazine at the time that had an article stating a lot of Japanese gamers bought the N64 beat Mario 64, had no new games so a lot of them started returning it and buying the Playstation.

At first bolded:

When Final Fantasy 7 shipped in 1997, it was Square’s cash cow. The game pioneered 3D graphics techniques, helped Sony’s PlayStation outperform its competitors, established Japanese RPGs in the West and went on to sell more than 11 million copies. To many fans, it defined Square as a company.

Square was one of the biggest studios to jump ship, announcing in early 1996 that it had decided to shift its entire lineup to Sony’s hardware, with Final Fantasy 7 as the centerpiece.  By the end of the generation, almost all major third-party studios had signed up with Sony, in part due to the economic advantages of manufacturing games on PlayStation’s CDs compared to Nintendo 64’s cartridges.

"PlayStation games being on CDs was the biggest factor." Hironobu Sakaguchi (Producer and executive vice president, Square Japan; Chairman and chief executive officer, Square USA)

I think it was the third year of the PlayStation. They were still struggling to compete with Sega and Nintendo in the U.S. And compared to Sega and Nintendo, Sony’s first-party portfolio was rather weak. So once we decided to [develop FF7 on PlayStation], Sony really strongly asked for the publishing rights to Square titles in America as well as in Europe. Yoshihiro Maruyama (Executive vice president, Square U.S.)

Final Fantasy 7 An Oral History

At 2nd bolded: Yes, this contributes heavily to the OP's point.

After a strong launch year, the decision to use the cartridge format is said to have contributed to the diminished release pace and higher price of games compared to the competition, and thus Nintendo was unable to maintain its lead in the United States.

This is corroborated by the statements previously quoted from Square as well. 

Sony was having problems beating Saturn in Japan and was getting beaten by the N64 before people realized the N64 droughts weren't just a one time thing.

You are kidding yourself if you think they could have beaten Nintendo with Mario 64, Final Fantasy 7/8/9, Zelda: OoT, GoldenEye, Mario Kart 64 and basically most/all 3rd party CD games being multiplat day and date (ie: Resident Evil 2/3, Dino Crisis, etc. etc. etc.) so no software droughts at all. 

Sony would've lost without having all the 3rd party support exclusive basically to PSOne, they're a pitbull with no teeth or claws.

Squaresoft's management did not want to change from Nintendo, they basically had no choice because the N64 simply could not run a game like FF7 at all. 

People can't really understand what having Nintendo, Rare, and Squaresoft all exclusive would've been like either. It would be like having a hardware system with EAD, Naughty Dog, and Capcom exclusive today or something just on the 1st/2nd party side. Those were the three best developers on the planet. 

Most, if not all of that third-party support was lost because of cartridges; it was a really arrogant decision by Nintendo to put devs in that position. The reason PSX textures and audio were so much crisper than N64s was because of the file-size limitations resulting from cartridges. Much of the dev process on the N64 revolved around shrinking game size down. It was difficult to get things looking both nice in 3D, and small in size, thanks to the use of cartridges.

But the difficulty of development wasn't the only problem. Cartridges were also far more expensive for publishers to sell. So, on the business end, it was really terrible. Prices were often heavily offset to the customer. The business reason was also the reason for the push to fit on the 8MB cartridges. George Harrison, former President of Nintendo of America confirmed that the business reason surrounding cartridge size and space was the main reason - he claims Nintendo wanted to stick with cartridges because of piracy concerns and that didn't go over well with third parties who then flocked to Playstation.

But I do agree, Nintendo's former CEO Yamauchi really aggravated relationship with third parties after that. Square's former Hironobu Sakaguchi and Tomoyuki Takechi said Yamauchi was convicted to never doing business with them again because they couldn't do FF7 on Nintendo hardware. But non-leadership staff from Square have said they were not allowed into Nintendo offices until the age of Iwata.

So, I think that maybe there were other issues that contributed to Nintendo never really recovering from the cartridge fiasco on the N64 - political issues with Hiroshi Yamauchi who, IMO, was not as great of a leader as many have made him out to be. His poor qualities really shone through in the N64 era. Unfortunately, because of Japanese politeness, it's rare to find people who will directly state their positions about him.

"Playstation basically built their platform on the failings of Nintendo" is a really accurate statement of the situation, IMO. I don't think Sony would have got far without Nintendo blundering with cartridges. Remember, PSX was getting killed by the SNES; had the N64 avoided their cartridge crash, I don't think the status quo would have changed. In fact, I wonder if Nintendo would have dominated even harder than they did in the 16-bit era.

People really don't understand either that circa 1995/1996, "Playstation" is nothing close to what it is now. It was not a very established brand.

As mentioned above the SNES was outselling it and the N64 demolished its early sales. In Japan the Saturn was beating the Playstation.

Things started to shift dramatically around late '96/'97 when it became clear Nintendo didn't have the games they were famous for.

That's the other thing you have to understand about this time period, pre-1997 "Nintendo = all games". Not just Nintendo games. Nintendo systems meant Final Fantasy, Street Fighter, Castlevania, Ninja Turtles, Megaman, and all the major 3rd party games, that's all people knew until then. The idea of a Nintendo system without these games was a foreign concept.

Before that really it was not uncommon at all for a person to have maybe Mario for the NES, but no other Nintendo published games. My neighbor had SMB/Duck Hunt, but outside of that all his games were 3rd party -- Megaman 3, Tecmo Bowl, Duck Tales, Ninja Gaiden. That wasn't uncommon at all.  

I was one of them. Almost. I got my hands on Nintendo games from time to time but, until smb3, the games I played always felt like the worst. I was mainly a fan of the third party stuff. Capcom and Konami and Sunsoft dominated by childhood.

Yeah in 1995 Sony going in consoles looked like it would fail just as much as the last 3 attempts from big tech companies trying their hands at a console. NEC,Phillips,Panasonic (who at the time was about as big as Sony). Honestly, if Saturn was easy to develop for and had proper marketing for the west. N64 gone CD-Rom. Sony would have been the 3rd wheel like NEC before it.